Bleak House - Charles Dickens (read this if txt) 📗

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!