Bleak House
same exhausted deity, surrounded by worshippers, and terribly liable
to be bored to death, even while presiding at her own shrine. Mr.
Tulkinghorn is always the same speechless repository of noble
confidences, so oddly out of place and yet so perfectly at home. They
appear to take as little note of one another as any two people
enclosed within the same walls could. But whether each evermore
watches and suspects the other, evermore mistrustful of some great
reservation; whether each is evermore prepared at all points for the
other, and never to be taken unawares; what each would give to know
how much the other knows—all this is hidden, for the time, in their
own hearts.
CHAPTER XIII
Esther’s Narrative
We held many consultations about what Richard was to be, first
without Mr. Jarndyce, as he had requested, and afterwards with him,
but it was a long time before we seemed to make progress. Richard
said he was ready for anything. When Mr. Jarndyce doubted whether he
might not already be too old to enter the Navy, Richard said he had
thought of that, and perhaps he was. When Mr. Jarndyce asked him what
he thought of the Army, Richard said he had thought of that, too, and
it wasn’t a bad idea. When Mr. Jarndyce advised him to try and decide
within himself whether his old preference for the sea was an ordinary
boyish inclination or a strong impulse, Richard answered, Well he
really HAD tried very often, and he couldn’t make out.
“How much of this indecision of character,” Mr. Jarndyce said to me,
“is chargeable on that incomprehensible heap of uncertainty and
procrastination on which he has been thrown from his birth, I don’t
pretend to say; but that Chancery, among its other sins, is
responsible for some of it, I can plainly see. It has engendered or
confirmed in him a habit of putting off—and trusting to this, that,
and the other chance, without knowing what chance—and dismissing
everything as unsettled, uncertain, and confused. The character of
much older and steadier people may be even changed by the
circumstances surrounding them. It would be too much to expect that a
boy’s, in its formation, should be the subject of such influences and
escape them.”
I felt this to be true; though if I may venture to mention what I
thought besides, I thought it much to be regretted that Richard’s
education had not counteracted those influences or directed his
character. He had been eight years at a public school and had learnt,
I understood, to make Latin verses of several sorts in the most
admirable manner. But I never heard that it had been anybody’s
business to find out what his natural bent was, or where his failings
lay, or to adapt any kind of knowledge to HIM. HE had been adapted to
the verses and had learnt the art of making them to such perfection
that if he had remained at school until he was of age, I suppose he
could only have gone on making them over and over again unless he had
enlarged his education by forgetting how to do it. Still, although I
had no doubt that they were very beautiful, and very improving, and
very sufficient for a great many purposes of life, and always
remembered all through life, I did doubt whether Richard would not
have profited by some one studying him a little, instead of his
studying them quite so much.
To be sure, I knew nothing of the subject and do not even now know
whether the young gentlemen of classic Rome or Greece made verses to
the same extent—or whether the young gentlemen of any country ever
did.
“I haven’t the least idea,” said Richard, musing, “what I had better
be. Except that I am quite sure I don’t want to go into the Church,
it’s a toss-up.”
“You have no inclination in Mr. Kenge’s way?” suggested Mr. Jarndyce.
“I don’t know that, sir!” replied Richard. “I am fond of boating.
Articled clerks go a good deal on the water. It’s a capital
profession!”
“Surgeon—” suggested Mr. Jarndyce.
“That’s the thing, sir!” cried Richard.
I doubt if he had ever once thought of it before.
“That’s the thing, sir,” repeated Richard with the greatest
enthusiasm. “We have got it at last. M.R.C.S.!”
He was not to be laughed out of it, though he laughed at it heartily.
He said he had chosen his profession, and the more he thought of it,
the more he felt that his destiny was clear; the art of healing was
the art of all others for him. Mistrusting that he only came to this
conclusion because, having never had much chance of finding out for
himself what he was fitted for and having never been guided to the
discovery, he was taken by the newest idea and was glad to get rid of
the trouble of consideration, I wondered whether the Latin verses
often ended in this or whether Richard’s was a solitary case.
Mr. Jarndyce took great pains to talk with him seriously and to put
it to his good sense not to deceive himself in so important a matter.
Richard was a little grave after these interviews, but invariably
told Ada and me that it was all right, and then began to talk about
something else.
“By heaven!” cried Mr. Boythorn, who interested himself strongly in
the subject—though I need not say that, for he could do nothing
weakly; “I rejoice to find a young gentleman of spirit and gallantry
devoting himself to that noble profession! The more spirit there is
in it, the better for mankind and the worse for those mercenary
task-masters and low tricksters who delight in putting that
illustrious art at a disadvantage in the world. By all that is base
and despicable,” cried Mr. Boythorn, “the treatment of surgeons
aboard ship is such that I would submit the legs—both legs—of every
member of the Admiralty Board to a compound fracture and render it a
transportable offence in any qualified practitioner to set them if
the system were not wholly changed in eight and forty hours!”
“Wouldn’t you give them a week?” asked Mr. Jarndyce.
“No!” cried Mr. Boythorn firmly. “Not on any consideration! Eight and
forty hours! As to corporations, parishes, vestry-boards, and similar
gatherings of jolter-headed clods who assemble to exchange such
speeches that, by heaven, they ought to be worked in quicksilver
mines for the short remainder of their miserable existence, if it
were only to prevent their detestable English from contaminating a
language spoken in the presence of the sun—as to those fellows, who
meanly take advantage of the ardour of gentlemen in the pursuit of
knowledge to recompense the inestimable services of the best years of
their lives, their long study, and their expensive education with
pittances too small for the acceptance of clerks, I would have the
necks of every one of them wrung and their skulls arranged in
Surgeons’ Hall for the contemplation of the whole profession in order
that its younger members might understand from actual measurement, in
early life, HOW thick skulls may become!”
He wound up this vehement declaration by looking round upon us with a
most agreeable smile and suddenly thundering, “Ha, ha, ha!” over and
over again, until anybody else might have been expected to be quite
subdued by the exertion.
As Richard still continued to say that he was fixed in his choice
after repeated periods for consideration had been recommended by Mr.
Jarndyce and had expired, and he still continued to assure Ada and me
in the same final manner that it was “all right,” it became advisable
to take Mr. Kenge into council. Mr. Kenge, therefore, came down to
dinner one day, and leaned back in his chair, and turned his
eye-glasses over and over, and spoke in a sonorous voice, and did
exactly what I remembered to have seen him do when I was a little
girl.
“Ah!” said Mr. Kenge. “Yes. Well! A very good profession, Mr.
Jarndyce, a very good profession.”
“The course of study and preparation requires to be diligently
pursued,” observed my guardian with a glance at Richard.
“Oh, no doubt,” said Mr. Kenge. “Diligently.”
“But that being the case, more or less, with all pursuits that are
worth much,” said Mr. Jarndyce, “it is not a special consideration
which another choice would be likely to escape.”
“Truly,” said Mr. Kenge. “And Mr. Richard Carstone, who has so
meritoriously acquitted himself in the—shall I say the classic
shades?—in which his youth had been passed, will, no doubt, apply
the habits, if not the principles and practice, of versification in
that tongue in which a poet was said (unless I mistake) to be born,
not made, to the more eminently practical field of action on which he
enters.”
“You may rely upon it,” said Richard in his off-hand manner, “that I
shall go at it and do my best.”
“Very well, Mr. Jarndyce!” said Mr. Kenge, gently nodding his head.
“Really, when we are assured by Mr. Richard that he means to go at it
and to do his best,” nodding feelingly and smoothly over those
expressions, “I would submit to you that we have only to inquire into
the best mode of carrying out the object of his ambition. Now, with
reference to placing Mr. Richard with some sufficiently eminent
practitioner. Is there any one in view at present?”
“No one, Rick, I think?” said my guardian.
“No one, sir,” said Richard.
“Quite so!” observed Mr. Kenge. “As to situation, now. Is there any
particular feeling on that head?”
“N—no,” said Richard.
“Quite so!” observed Mr. Kenge again.
“I should like a little variety,” said Richard; “I mean a good range
of experience.”
“Very requisite, no doubt,” returned Mr. Kenge. “I think this may be
easily arranged, Mr. Jarndyce? We have only, in the first place, to
discover a sufficiently eligible practitioner; and as soon as we make
our want—and shall I add, our ability to pay a premium?—known, our
only difficulty will be in the selection of one from a large number.
We have only, in the second place, to observe those little
formalities which are rendered necessary by our time of life and our
being under the guardianship of the court. We shall soon be—shall I
say, in Mr. Richard’s own light-hearted manner, ‘going at it’—to our
heart’s content. It is a coincidence,” said Mr. Kenge with a tinge of
melancholy in his smile, “one of those coincidences which may or may
not require an explanation beyond our present limited faculties, that
I have a cousin in the medical profession. He might be deemed
eligible by you and might be disposed to respond to this proposal. I
can answer for him as little as for you, but he MIGHT!”
As this was an opening in the prospect, it was arranged that Mr.
Kenge should see his cousin. And as Mr. Jarndyce had before proposed
to take us to London for a few weeks, it was settled next day that we
should make our visit at once and combine Richard’s business with it.
Mr. Boythorn leaving us within a week, we took up our abode at a
cheerful lodging near Oxford Street over an upholsterer’s shop.
London was a great wonder to us, and we were out for hours and hours
at a time, seeing the sights, which appeared to be less capable of
exhaustion than we were. We made the round of the principal theatres,
too, with great delight, and saw all the plays that were worth
seeing. I mention this because it was at the theatre that I began to
be made uncomfortable again by Mr. Guppy.
I was sitting in front of the box one night with Ada, and Richard was
in the place he liked best, behind Ada’s chair, when, happening to
look down into the pit, I saw Mr. Guppy, with his hair flattened down
upon his head and woe depicted in his face, looking up at me. I felt
all through the performance that he never looked at the actors but
constantly looked at me, and always with a carefully prepared
expression of the deepest misery and the profoundest dejection.
It quite spoiled my pleasure for that night because it was so very
embarrassing and so very ridiculous. But from that time forth, we