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

in the voice already mentioned; and

haply, on some occasions when these reach a sharper pitch than

usual, Mr. Snagsby mentions to the ‘prentices, “I think my little

woman is a-giving it to Guster!”

 

This proper name, so used by Mr. Snagsby, has before now sharpened

the wit of the Cook’s Courtiers to remark that it ought to be the

name of Mrs. Snagsby, seeing that she might with great force and

expression be termed a Guster, in compliment to her stormy

character. It is, however, the possession, and the only possession

except fifty shillings per annum and a very small box indifferently

filled with clothing, of a lean young woman from a workhouse (by

some supposed to have been christened Augusta) who, although she was

farmed or contracted for during her growing time by an amiable

benefactor of his species resident at Tooting, and cannot fail to

have been developed under the most favourable circumstances, “has

fits,” which the parish can’t account for.

 

Guster, really aged three or four and twenty, but looking a round

ten years older, goes cheap with this unaccountable drawback of

fits, and is so apprehensive of being returned on the hands of her

patron saint that except when she is found with her head in the

pail, or the sink, or the copper, or the dinner, or anything else

that happens to be near her at the time of her seizure, she is

always at work. She is a satisfaction to the parents and guardians

of the ‘prentices, who feel that there is little danger of her

inspiring tender emotions in the breast of youth; she is a

satisfaction to Mrs. Snagsby, who can always find fault with her;

she is a satisfaction to Mr. Snagsby, who thinks it a charity to

keep her. The lawstationer’s establishment is, in Guster’s eyes, a

temple of plenty and splendour. She believes the little drawing-room upstairs, always kept, as one may say, with its hair in papers

and its pinafore on, to be the most elegant apartment in

Christendom. The view it commands of Cook’s Court at one end (not

to mention a squint into Cursitor Street) and of Coavinses’ the

sheriff’s officer’s backyard at the other she regards as a prospect

of unequalled beauty. The portraits it displays in oil—and plenty

of it too—of Mr. Snagsby looking at Mrs. Snagsby and of Mrs.

Snagsby looking at Mr. Snagsby are in her eyes as achievements of

Raphael or Titian. Guster has some recompenses for her many

privations.

 

Mr. Snagsby refers everything not in the practical mysteries of the

business to Mrs. Snagsby. She manages the money, reproaches the

tax-gatherers, appoints the times and places of devotion on Sundays,

licenses Mr. Snagsby’s entertainments, and acknowledges no

responsibility as to what she thinks fit to provide for dinner,

insomuch that she is the high standard of comparison among the

neighbouring wives a long way down Chancery Lane on both sides, and

even out in Holborn, who in any domestic passages of arms habitually

call upon their husbands to look at the difference between their

(the wives’) position and Mrs. Snagsby’s, and their (the husbands’)

behaviour and Mr. Snagsby’s. Rumour, always flying bat-like about

Cook’s Court and skimming in and out at everybody’s windows, does

say that Mrs. Snagsby is jealous and inquisitive and that Mr.

Snagsby is sometimes worried out of house and home, and that if he

had the spirit of a mouse he wouldn’t stand it. It is even observed

that the wives who quote him to their self-willed husbands as a

shining example in reality look down upon him and that nobody does

so with greater superciliousness than one particular lady whose lord

is more than suspected of laying his umbrella on her as an

instrument of correction. But these vague whisperings may arise

from Mr. Snagsby’s being in his way rather a meditative and poetical

man, loving to walk in Staple Inn in the summer-time and to observe

how countrified the sparrows and the leaves are, also to lounge

about the Rolls Yard of a Sunday afternoon and to remark (if in good

spirits) that there were old times once and that you’d find a stone

coffin or two now under that chapel, he’ll be bound, if you was to

dig for it. He solaces his imagination, too, by thinking of the

many Chancellors and Vices, and Masters of the Rolls who are

deceased; and he gets such a flavour of the country out of telling

the two ‘prentices how he HAS heard say that a brook “as clear as

crystial” once ran right down the middle of Holborn, when Turnstile

really was a turnstile, leading slap away into the meadows—gets

such a flavour of the country out of this that he never wants to go

there.

 

The day is closing in and the gas is lighted, but is not yet fully

effective, for it is not quite dark. Mr. Snagsby standing at his

shop-door looking up at the clouds sees a crow who is out late skim

westward over the slice of sky belonging to Cook’s Court. The crow

flies straight across Chancery Lane and Lincoln’s Inn Garden into

Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

 

Here, in a large house, formerly a house of state, lives Mr.

Tulkinghorn. It is let off in sets of chambers now, and in those

shrunken fragments of its greatness, lawyers lie like maggots in

nuts. But its roomy staircases, passages, and antechambers still

remain; and even its painted ceilings, where Allegory, in Roman

helmet and celestial linen, sprawls among balustrades and pillars,

flowers, clouds, and big-legged boys, and makes the head ache—as

would seem to be Allegory’s object always, more or less. Here,

among his many boxes labelled with transcendent names, lives Mr.

Tulkinghorn, when not speechlessly at home in country-houses where

the great ones of the earth are bored to death. Here he is to-day,

quiet at his table. An oyster of the old school whom nobody can

open.

 

Like as he is to look at, so is his apartment in the dusk of the

present afternoon. Rusty, out of date, withdrawing from attention,

able to afford it. Heavy, broad-backed, old-fashioned, mahogany-and-horsehair chairs, not easily lifted; obsolete tables with

spindle-legs and dusty baize covers; presentation prints of the

holders of great titles in the last generation or the last but one,

environ him. A thick and dingy Turkey-carpet muffles the floor

where he sits, attended by two candles in old-fashioned silver

candlesticks that give a very insufficient light to his large room.

The titles on the backs of his books have retired into the binding;

everything that can have a lock has got one; no key is visible.

Very few loose papers are about. He has some manuscript near him,

but is not referring to it. With the round top of an inkstand and

two broken bits of sealing-wax he is silently and slowly working out

whatever train of indecision is in his mind. Now the inkstand top

is in the middle, now the red bit of sealing-wax, now the black bit.

That’s not it. Mr. Tulkinghorn must gather them all up and begin

again.

 

Here, beneath the painted ceiling, with foreshortened Allegory

staring down at his intrusion as if it meant to swoop upon him, and

he cutting it dead, Mr. Tulkinghorn has at once his house and

office. He keeps no staff, only one middle-aged man, usually a

little out at elbows, who sits in a high pew in the hall and is

rarely overburdened with business. Mr. Tulkinghorn is not in a

common way. He wants no clerks. He is a great reservoir of

confidences, not to be so tapped. His clients want HIM; he is all

in all. Drafts that he requires to be drawn are drawn by special-pleaders in the temple on mysterious instructions; fair copies that

he requires to be made are made at the stationers’, expense being no

consideration. The middle-aged man in the pew knows scarcely more

of the affairs of the peerage than any crossing-sweeper in Holborn.

 

The red bit, the black bit, the inkstand top, the other inkstand

top, the little sand-box. So! You to the middle, you to the right,

you to the left. This train of indecision must surely be worked out

now or never. Now! Mr. Tulkinghorn gets up, adjusts his

spectacles, puts on his hat, puts the manuscript in his pocket, goes

out, tells the middle-aged man out at elbows, “I shall be back

presently.” Very rarely tells him anything more explicit.

 

Mr. Tulkinghorn goes, as the crow came—not quite so straight, but

nearly—to Cook’s Court, Cursitor Street. To Snagsby’s, LawStationer’s, Deeds engrossed and copied, Law-Writing executed in all

its branches, &c., &c., &c.

 

It is somewhere about five or six o’clock in the afternoon, and a

balmy fragrance of warm tea hovers in Cook’s Court. It hovers about

Snagsby’s door. The hours are early there: dinner at half-past one

and supper at half-past nine. Mr. Snagsby was about to descend into

the subterranean regions to take tea when he looked out of his door

just now and saw the crow who was out late.

 

“Master at home?”

 

Guster is minding the shop, for the ‘prentices take tea in the

kitchen with Mr. and Mrs. Snagsby; consequently, the robe-maker’s

two daughters, combing their curls at the two glasses in the two

second-floor windows of the opposite house, are not driving the two

‘prentices to distraction as they fondly suppose, but are merely

awakening the unprofitable admiration of Guster, whose hair won’t

grow, and never would, and it is confidently thought, never will.

 

“Master at home?” says Mr. Tulkinghorn.

 

Master is at home, and Guster will fetch him. Guster disappears,

glad to get out of the shop, which she regards with mingled dread

and veneration as a storehouse of awful implements of the great

torture of the law—a place not to be entered after the gas is

turned off.

 

Mr. Snagsby appears, greasy, warm, herbaceous, and chewing. Bolts a

bit of bread and butter. Says, “Bless my soul, sir! Mr.

Tulkinghorn!”

 

“I want half a word with you, Snagsby.”

 

“Certainly, sir! Dear me, sir, why didn’t you send your young man

round for me? Pray walk into the back shop, sir.” Snagsby has

brightened in a moment.

 

The confined room, strong of parchment-grease, is warehouse,

counting-house, and copying-office. Mr. Tulkinghorn sits, facing

round, on a stool at the desk.

 

“Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Snagsby.”

 

“Yes, sir.” Mr. Snagsby turns up the gas and coughs behind his

hand, modestly anticipating profit. Mr. Snagsby, as a timid man, is

accustomed to cough with a variety of expressions, and so to save

words.

 

“You copied some affidavits in that cause for me lately.”

 

“Yes, sir, we did.”

 

“There was one of them,” says Mr. Tulkinghorn, carelessly feeling—

tight, unopenable oyster of the old school!—in the wrong coat-pocket, “the handwriting of which is peculiar, and I rather like.

As I happened to be passing, and thought I had it about me, I looked

in to ask you—but I haven’t got it. No matter, any other time will

do. Ah! here it is! I looked in to ask you who copied this.”

 

“Who copied this, sir?” says Mr. Snagsby, taking it, laying it flat

on the desk, and separating all the sheets at once with a twirl and

a twist of the left hand peculiar to lawstationers. “We gave this

out, sir. We were giving out rather a large quantity of work just

at that time. I can tell you in a moment who copied it, sir, by

referring to my book.”

 

Mr. Snagsby takes his book down from the safe, makes another bolt of

the bit of bread and butter which seemed to have stopped short, eyes

the affidavit aside, and brings his right forefinger travelling down