BLEAK HOUSE

Inapoi la Sumar

CHAPTER X  

The Law-Writer

On the eastern borders of Chancery Lane, that is to say, more  particularly in Cook's Court, Cursitor Street, Mr. Snagsby, law- stationer, pursues his lawful calling.  In the shade of Cook's  Court, at most times a shady place, Mr. Snagsby has dealt in all  sorts of blank forms of legal process; in skins and rolls of  parchment; in paper--foolscap, brief, draft, brown, white, whitey- brown, and blotting; in stamps; in office-quills, pens, ink, India- rubber, pounce, pins, pencils, sealing-wax, and wafers; in red tape  and green ferret; in pocket-books, almanacs, diaries, and law lists;  in string boxes, rulers, inkstands--glass and leaden--pen-knives,  scissors, bodkins, and other small office-cutlery; in short, in  articles too numerous to mention, ever since he was out of his time  and went into partnership with Peffer.  On that occasion, Cook's  Court was in a manner revolutionized by the new inscription in fresh  paint, PEFFER AND SNAGSBY, displacing the time-honoured and not  easily to be deciphered legend PEFFER only.  For smoke, which is the  London ivy, had so wreathed itself round Peffer's name and clung to  his dwelling-place that the affectionate parasite quite overpowered  the parent tree.  Peffer is never seen in Cook's Court now.  He is not expected there,  for he has been recumbent this quarter of a century in the  churchyard of St. Andrews, Holborn, with the waggons and hackney- coaches roaring past him all the day and half the night like one  great dragon. 

If he ever steal forth when the dragon is at rest to  air himself again in Cook's Court until admonished to return by the  crowing of the sanguine cock in the cellar at the little dairy in  Cursitor Street, whose ideas of daylight it would be curious to  ascertain, since he knows from his personal observation next to  nothing about it--if Peffer ever do revisit the pale glimpses of  Cook's Court, which no law-stationer in the trade can positively  deny, he comes invisibly, and no one is the worse or wiser.  In his lifetime, and likewise in the period of Snagsby's "time" of  seven long years, there dwelt with Peffer in the same law- stationering premises a niece--a short, shrewd niece, something too  violently compressed about the waist, and with a sharp nose like a  sharp autumn evening, inclining to be frosty towards the end.  The  Cook's Courtiers had a rumour flying among them that the mother of  this niece did, in her daughter's childhood, moved by too jealous a  solicitude that her figure should approach perfection, lace her up  every morning with her maternal foot against the bed-post for a  stronger hold and purchase; and further, that she exhibited  internally pints of vinegar and lemon-juice, which acids, they held,  had mounted to the nose and temper of the patient.  With whichsoever  of the many tongues of Rumour this frothy report originated, it  either never reached or never influenced the ears of young Snagsby,  who, having wooed and won its fair subject on his arrival at man's  estate, entered into two partnerships at once.  So now, in Cook's  Court, Cursitor Street, Mr. Snagsby and the niece are one; and the  niece still cherishes her figure, which, however tastes may differ,  is unquestionably so far precious that there is mighty little of it.  Mr. and Mrs. Snagsby are not only one bone and one flesh, but, to  the neighbours' thinking, one voice too. 

That voice, appearing to  proceed from Mrs. Snagsby alone, is heard in Cook's Court very  often.  Mr. Snagsby, otherwise than as he finds expression through  these dulcet tones, is rarely heard.  He is a mild, bald, timid man  with a shining head and a scrubby clump of black hair sticking out  at the back.  He tends to meekness and obesity.  As he stands at his  door in Cook's Court in his grey shop-coat and black calico sleeves,  looking up at the clouds, or stands behind a desk in his dark shop  with a heavy flat ruler, snipping and slicing at sheepskin in  company with his two 'prentices, he is emphatically a retiring and  unassuming man.  From beneath his feet, at such times, as from a  shrill ghost unquiet in its grave, there frequently arise  complainings and lamentations 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 law-stationer'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 tbe 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, Law- Stationer'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  a page of the book, "Jewby--Packer--Jarndyce." 

"Jarndyce!  Here we are, sir," says Mr. Snagsby. 

"To be sure!  I  might have remembered it.  This was given out, sir, to a writer who  lodges just over on the opposite side of the lane." 

Mr. Tulkinghorn has seen the entry, found it before the law- stationer, read it while the forefinger was coming down the hill. 

"WHAT do you call him?  Nemo?" says Mr. Tulkinghorn. 

"Nemo, sir.   Here it is.  Forty-two folio.  Given out on the Wednesday night at  eight o'clock, brought in on the Thursday morning at half after  nine."  "Nemo!" repeats Mr. Tulkinghorn. 

"Nemo is Latin for no one." 

"It must be English for some one, sir, I think," Mr. Snagsby submits  with his deferential cough. 

"It is a person's name.  Here it is,  you see, sir!  Forty-two folio.  Given out Wednesday night, eight  o'clock; brought in Thursday morning, half after nine." 

The tail of Mr. Snagsby's eye becomes conscious of the head of Mrs.  Snagsby looking in at the shop-door to know what he means by  deserting his tea.  Mr. Snagsby addresses an explanatory cough to  Mrs. Snagsby, as who should say, "My dear, a customer!" 

"Half after nine, sir," repeats Mr. Snagsby. 

"Our law-writers, who  live by job-work, are a queer lot; and this may not be his name, but  it's the name he goes by.  I remember now, sir, that he gives it in  a written advertisement he sticks up down at the Rule Office, and  the King's Bench Office, and the Judges' Chambers, and so forth.   You know the kind of document, sir--wanting employ?" 

Mr. Tulkinghorn glances through the little window at the back of  Coavinses', the sheriff's officer's, where lights shine in  Coavinses' windows.  Coavinses' coffee-room is at the back, and the  shadows of several gentlemen under a cloud loom cloudily upon the  blinds.  Mr. Snagsby takes the opportunity of slightly turning his  head to glance over his shoulder at his little woman and to make  apologetic motions with his mouth to this effect: "Tul-king-horn-- rich--in-flu-en-tial!" 

"Have you given this man work before?" asks Mr. Tulkinghorn. 

"Oh, dear, yes, sir!  Work of yours." 

"Thinking of more important matters, I forget where you said he  lived?" 

"Across the lane, sir.  In fact, he lodges at a--" Mr. Snagsby makes  another bolt, as if the bit of bread and buffer were insurmountable  "--at a rag and bottle shop." 

"Can you show me the place as I go back?" 

"With the greatest pleasure, sir!"  Mr. Snagsby pulls off his sleeves and his grey coat, pulls on his  black coat, takes his hat from its peg. 

"Oh! Here is my little  woman!" he says aloud. 

"My dear, will you be so kind as to tell one  of the lads to look after the shop while I step across the lane with  Mr. Tulkinghorn?  Mrs. Snagsby, sir--I shan't be two minutes, my  love!" 

Mrs. Snagsby bends to the lawyer, retires behind the counter, peeps  at them through the window-blind, goes softly into the back office,  refers to the entries in the book still lying open.  Is evidently  curious.  "You will find that the place is rough, sir," says Mr. Snagsby,  walking deferentially in the road and leaving the narrow pavement to  the lawyer; "and the party is very rough.  But they're a wild lot in  general, sir.  The advantage of this particular man is that he never  wants sleep.  He'll go at it right on end if you want him to, as  long as ever you like." 

It is quite dark now, and the gas-lamps have acquired their full  effect.  Jostling against clerks going to post the day's letters,  and against counsel and attorneys going home to dinner, and against  plaintiffs and defendants and suitors of all sorts, and against the  general crowd, in whose way the forensic wisdom of ages has  interposed a million of obstacles to the transaction of the  commonest business of life; diving through law and equity, and  through that kindred mystery, the street mud, which is made of  nobody knows what and collects about us nobody knows whence or how-- we only knowing in general that when there is too much of it we find  it necessary to shovel it away--the lawyer and the law-stationer  come to a rag and bottle shop and general emporium of much  disregarded merchandise, lying and being in the shadow of the wall  of Lincoln's Inn, and kept, as is announced in paint, to all whom it  may concern, by one Krook.  "This is where he lives, sir," says the law-stationer. 

"This is where he lives, is it?" says the lawyer unconcernedly. 

"Thank you." 

"Are you not going in, sir?" 

"No, thank you, no; I am going on to the Fields at present.  Good  evening.  Thank you!" 

Mr. Snagsby lifts his hat and returns to his  little woman and his tea.  But Mr. Tulkinghorn does not go on to the Fields at present.  He  goes a short way, turns back, comes again to the shop of Mr. Krook,  and enters it straight.  It is dim enough, with a blot-headed candle  or so in the windows, and an old man and a cat sitting in the back  part by a fire.  The old man rises and comes forward, with another  blot-headed candle in his hand. 

"Pray is your lodger within?"  "Male or female, sir?" says Mr. Krook. 

"Male.  The person who does copying." 

Mr. Krook has eyed his man narrowly.  Knows him by sight.  Has an  indistinct impression of his aristocratic repute. 

"Did you wish to see him, sir?" 

"Yes." 

"It's what I seldom do myself," says Mr. Krook with a grin. 

"Shall  I call him down?  But it's a weak chance if he'd come, sir!" 

"I'll go up to him, then," says Mr. Tulkinghorn. 

"Second floor, sir.  Take the candle.  Up there!" 

Mr. Krook, with  his cat beside him, stands at the bottom of the staircase, looking  after Mr. Tulkinghorn. 

"Hi-hi!" he says when Mr. Tulkinghorn has  nearly disappeared.  The lawyer looks down over the hand-rail.  The  cat expands her wicked mouth and snarls at him. 

"Order, Lady Jane!  Behave yourself to visitors, my lady!  You know  what they say of my lodger?" whispers Krook, going up a step or two. 

"What do they say of him?" 

"They say he has sold himself to the enemy, but you and I know  better--he don't buy. 

I'll tell you what, though; my lodger is so  black-humoured and gloomy that I believe he'd as soon make that  bargain as any other.  Don't put him out, sir.  That's my advice!"  Mr. Tulkinghorn with a nod goes on his way.  He comes to the dark  door on the second floor.  He knocks, receives no answer, opens it,  and accidentally extinguishes his candle in doing so.  The air of the room is almost bad enough to have extinguished it if  he had not.  It is a small room, nearly black with soot, and grease,  and dirt.  In the rusty skeleton of a grate, pinched at the middle  as if poverty had gripped it, a red coke fire burns low.  In the  corner by the chimney stand a deal table and a broken desk, a  wilderness marked with a rain of ink.  In another corner a ragged  old portmanteau on one of the two chairs serves for cabinet or  wardrobe; no larger one is needed, for it collapses like the cheeks  of a starved man. 

The floor is bare, except that one old mat,  trodden to shreds of rope-yarn, lies perishing upon the hearth.  No  curtain veils the darkness of the night, but the discoloured  shutters are drawn together, and through the two gaunt holes pierced  in them, famine might be staring in--the banshee of the man upon the  bed.  For, on a low bed opposite the fire, a confusion of dirty patchwork,  lean-ribbed ticking, and coarse sacking, the lawyer, hesitating just  within the doorway, sees a man.  He lies there, dressed in shirt and  trousers, with bare feet. 

He has a yellow look in the spectral  darkness of a candle that has guttered down until the whole length  of its wick (still burning) has doubled over and left a tower of  winding-sheet above it.  His hair is ragged, mingling with his  whiskers and his beard--the latter, ragged too, and grown, like the  scum and mist around him, in neglect.  Foul and filthy as the room  is, foul and filthy as the air is, it is not easy to perceive what  fumes those are which most oppress the senses in it; but through the  general sickliness and faintness, and the odour of stale tobacco,  there comes into the lawyer's mouth the bitter, vapid taste of  opium. 

"Hallo, my friend!" he cries, and strikes his iron candlestick  against the door.  He thinks he has awakened his friend.  He lies a little turned away,  but his eyes are surely open. 

"Hallo, my friend!" he cries again. 

"Hallo!  Hallo!" 

As he rattles on the door, the candle which has drooped so long goes  out and leaves him in the dark, with the gaunt eyes in the shutters  staring down upon the bed.

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