Bleak House
monied might the means abundantly of wearying out the right, which so
exhausts finances, patience, courage, hope, so overthrows the brain
and breaks the heart, that there is not an honourable man among its
practitioners who would not give—who does not often give—the
warning, “Suffer any wrong that can be done you rather than come
here!”
Who happen to be in the Lord Chancellor’s court this murky afternoon
besides the Lord Chancellor, the counsel in the cause, two or three
counsel who are never in any cause, and the well of solicitors before
mentioned? There is the registrar below the judge, in wig and gown;
and there are two or three maces, or petty-bags, or privy purses, or
whatever they may be, in legal court suits. These are all yawning,
for no crumb of amusement ever falls from Jarndyce and Jarndyce (the
cause in hand), which was squeezed dry years upon years ago. The
short-hand writers, the reporters of the court, and the reporters of
the newspapers invariably decamp with the rest of the regulars when
Jarndyce and Jarndyce comes on. Their places are a blank. Standing on
a seat at the side of the hall, the better to peer into the curtained
sanctuary, is a little mad old woman in a squeezed bonnet who is
always in court, from its sitting to its rising, and always expecting
some incomprehensible judgment to be given in her favour. Some say
she really is, or was, a party to a suit, but no one knows for
certain because no one cares. She carries some small litter in a
reticule which she calls her documents, principally consisting of
paper matches and dry lavender. A sallow prisoner has come up, in
custody, for the half-dozenth time to make a personal application “to
purge himself of his contempt,” which, being a solitary surviving
executor who has fallen into a state of conglomeration about accounts
of which it is not pretended that he had ever any knowledge, he is
not at all likely ever to do. In the meantime his prospects in life
are ended. Another ruined suitor, who periodically appears from
Shropshire and breaks out into efforts to address the Chancellor at
the close of the day’s business and who can by no means be made to
understand that the Chancellor is legally ignorant of his existence
after making it desolate for a quarter of a century, plants himself
in a good place and keeps an eye on the judge, ready to call out “My
Lord!” in a voice of sonorous complaint on the instant of his rising.
A few lawyers’ clerks and others who know this suitor by sight linger
on the chance of his furnishing some fun and enlivening the dismal
weather a little.
Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on. This scarecrow of a suit has, in
course of time, become so complicated that no man alive knows what it
means. The parties to it understand it least, but it has been
observed that no two Chancery lawyers can talk about it for five
minutes without coming to a total disagreement as to all the
premises. Innumerable children have been born into the cause;
innumerable young people have married into it; innumerable old people
have died out of it. Scores of persons have deliriously found
themselves made parties in Jarndyce and Jarndyce without knowing how
or why; whole families have inherited legendary hatreds with the
suit. The little plaintiff or defendant who was promised a new
rocking-horse when Jarndyce and Jarndyce should be settled has grown
up, possessed himself of a real horse, and trotted away into the
other world. Fair wards of court have faded into mothers and
grandmothers; a long procession of Chancellors has come in and gone
out; the legion of bills in the suit have been transformed into mere
bills of mortality; there are not three Jarndyces left upon the earth
perhaps since old Tom Jarndyce in despair blew his brains out at a
coffee-house in Chancery Lane; but Jarndyce and Jarndyce still drags
its dreary length before the court, perennially hopeless.
Jarndyce and Jarndyce has passed into a joke. That is the only good
that has ever come of it. It has been death to many, but it is a joke
in the profession. Every master in Chancery has had a reference out
of it. Every Chancellor was “in it,” for somebody or other, when he
was counsel at the bar. Good things have been said about it by
blue-nosed, bulbous-shoed old benchers in select port-wine committee
after dinner in hall. Articled clerks have been in the habit of
fleshing their legal wit upon it. The last Lord Chancellor handled it
neatly, when, correcting Mr. Blowers, the eminent silk gown who said
that such a thing might happen when the sky rained potatoes, he
observed, “or when we get through Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Mr.
Blowers”—a pleasantry that particularly tickled the maces, bags, and
purses.
How many people out of the suit Jarndyce and Jarndyce has stretched
forth its unwholesome hand to spoil and corrupt would be a very wide
question. From the master upon whose impaling files reams of dusty
warrants in Jarndyce and Jarndyce have grimly writhed into many
shapes, down to the copying-clerk in the Six Clerks’ Office who has
copied his tens of thousands of Chancery folio-pages under that
eternal heading, no man’s nature has been made better by it. In
trickery, evasion, procrastination, spoliation, botheration, under
false pretences of all sorts, there are influences that can never
come to good. The very solicitors’ boys who have kept the wretched
suitors at bay, by protesting time out of mind that Mr. Chizzle,
Mizzle, or otherwise was particularly engaged and had appointments
until dinner, may have got an extra moral twist and shuffle into
themselves out of Jarndyce and Jarndyce. The receiver in the cause
has acquired a goodly sum of money by it but has acquired too a
distrust of his own mother and a contempt for his own kind. Chizzle,
Mizzle, and otherwise have lapsed into a habit of vaguely promising
themselves that they will look into that outstanding little matter
and see what can be done for Drizzle—who was not well used—when
Jarndyce and Jarndyce shall be got out of the office. Shirking and
sharking in all their many varieties have been sown broadcast by the
ill-fated cause; and even those who have contemplated its history
from the outermost circle of such evil have been insensibly tempted
into a loose way of letting bad things alone to take their own bad
course, and a loose belief that if the world go wrong it was in some
off-hand manner never meant to go right.
Thus, in the midst of the mud and at the heart of the fog, sits the
Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.
“Mr. Tangle,” says the Lord High Chancellor, latterly something
restless under the eloquence of that learned gentleman.
“Mlud,” says Mr. Tangle. Mr. Tangle knows more of Jarndyce and
Jarndyce than anybody. He is famous for it—supposed never to have
read anything else since he left school.
“Have you nearly concluded your argument?”
“Mlud, no—variety of points—feel it my duty tsubmit—ludship,” is
the reply that slides out of Mr. Tangle.
“Several members of the bar are still to be heard, I believe?” says
the Chancellor with a slight smile.
Eighteen of Mr. Tangle’s learned friends, each armed with a little
summary of eighteen hundred sheets, bob up like eighteen hammers in a
pianoforte, make eighteen bows, and drop into their eighteen places
of obscurity.
“We will proceed with the hearing on Wednesday fortnight,” says the
Chancellor. For the question at issue is only a question of costs, a
mere bud on the forest tree of the parent suit, and really will come
to a settlement one of these days.
The Chancellor rises; the bar rises; the prisoner is brought forward
in a hurry; the man from Shropshire cries, “My lord!” Maces, bags,
and purses indignantly proclaim silence and frown at the man from
Shropshire.
“In reference,” proceeds the Chancellor, still on Jarndyce and
Jarndyce, “to the young girl—”
“Begludship’s pardon—boy,” says Mr. Tangle prematurely. “In
reference,” proceeds the Chancellor with extra distinctness, “to the
young girl and boy, the two young people”—Mr. Tangle crushed—“whom
I directed to be in attendance to-day and who are now in my private
room, I will see them and satisfy myself as to the expediency of
making the order for their residing with their uncle.”
Mr. Tangle on his legs again. “Begludship’s pardon—dead.”
“With their”—Chancellor looking through his double eye-glass at the
papers on his desk—“grandfather.”
“Begludship’s pardon—victim of rash action—brains.”
Suddenly a very little counsel with a terrific bass voice arises,
fully inflated, in the back settlements of the fog, and says, “Will
your lordship allow me? I appear for him. He is a cousin, several
times removed. I am not at the moment prepared to inform the court in
what exact remove he is a cousin, but he IS a cousin.”
Leaving this address (delivered like a sepulchral message) ringing in
the rafters of the roof, the very little counsel drops, and the fog
knows him no more. Everybody looks for him. Nobody can see him.
“I will speak with both the young people,” says the Chancellor anew,
“and satisfy myself on the subject of their residing with their
cousin. I will mention the matter to-morrow morning when I take my
seat.”
The Chancellor is about to bow to the bar when the prisoner is
presented. Nothing can possibly come of the prisoner’s conglomeration
but his being sent back to prison, which is soon done. The man from
Shropshire ventures another remonstrative “My lord!” but the
Chancellor, being aware of him, has dexterously vanished. Everybody
else quickly vanishes too. A battery of blue bags is loaded with
heavy charges of papers and carried off by clerks; the little mad old
woman marches off with her documents; the empty court is locked up.
If all the injustice it has committed and all the misery it has
caused could only be locked up with it, and the whole burnt away in a
great funeral pyre—why so much the better for other parties than the
parties in Jarndyce and Jarndyce!
CHAPTER II
In Fashion
It is but a glimpse of the world of fashion that we want on this same
miry afternoon. It is not so unlike the Court of Chancery but that we
may pass from the one scene to the other, as the crow flies. Both the
world of fashion and the Court of Chancery are things of precedent
and usage: oversleeping Rip Van Winkles who have played at strange
games through a deal of thundery weather; sleeping beauties whom the
knight will wake one day, when all the stopped spits in the kitchen
shall begin to turn prodigiously!
It is not a large world. Relatively even to this world of ours, which
has its limits too (as your Highness shall find when you have made
the tour of it and are come to the brink of the void beyond), it is a
very little speck. There is much good in it; there are many good and
true people in it; it has its appointed place. But the evil of it is
that it is a world wrapped up in too much jeweller’s cotton and fine
wool, and cannot hear the rushing of the larger worlds, and cannot
see them as they circle round the sun. It is a deadened world, and
its growth is sometimes unhealthy for want of air.
My Lady Dedlock has returned to her house in town for a few days
previous to her departure for Paris, where her ladyship intends to
stay some weeks, after which her movements are uncertain. The
fashionable intelligence says so for the comfort of the Parisians,
and it knows all fashionable things. To know things otherwise were to
be unfashionable. My Lady Dedlock has been down at what she calls, in
familiar conversation, her “place” in Lincolnshire. The waters are
out in Lincolnshire. An arch of the bridge in the park has been
sapped and sopped away. The adjacent low-lying ground for half a mile