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Bleak House, by Charles Dickens (1852-1853) - Chapter 1 -
In Chancery
CHAPTER ONE
In Chancery
London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord
Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much
mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the
earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or
so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down
from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big
as full-grown snowflakes--gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death
of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed
to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another's umbrellas in a
general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners,
where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding
since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust
upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and
accumulating at compound interest.
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among
green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls deified among the
tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog
on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses
of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of
great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the
eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of
their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful
skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of
his shivering little 'prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping
over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they
were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.
Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the
streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by
husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their
time--as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look.
The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is
densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old
obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old
corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln's Inn Hall, at the
very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of
Chancery.
Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come
mud and mire too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition
which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds this
day in the sight of heaven and earth.
On such an afternoon, if ever, the Lord High Chancellor
ought to be sitting her--as here he is--with a foggy glory round his head,
softly fenced in with crimson cloth and curtains, addressed by a large advocate
with great whiskers, a little voice, and an interminable brief, and outwardly
directing his contemplation to the lantern in the roof, where he can see nothing
but fog. On such an afternoon some score of members of the High Court of
Chancery bar ought to be--as here they are--mistily engaged in one of the ten
thousand stages of an endless cause, tripping one another up on slippery
precedents, groping knee-deep in technicalities, running their goat-hair and
horsehair warded heads against walls of words and making a pretence of equity
with serious faces, as players might. On such an afternoon the various
solicitors in the cause, some two or three of whom have inherited it from their
fathers, who made a fortune by it, ought to be--as are they not?--ranged in a
line, in a long matted well (but you might look in vain for truth at the bottom
of it) between the registrar's red table and the silk gowns, with bills,
cross-bills, answers, rejoinders, injunctions, affidavits, issues, references to
masters, masters' reports, mountains of costly nonsense, piled before them. Well
may the court be dim, with wasting candles here and there; well may the fog hang
heavy in it, as if it would never get out; well may the stained-glass windows
lose their colour and admit no light of day into the place; well may the
uninitiated from the streets, who peep in through the glass panes in the door,
be deterred from entrance by its owlish aspect and by the drawl, languidly
echoing to the roof from the padded dais where the Lord High Chancellor looks
into the lantern that has no light in it and where the attendant wigs are all
stuck in a fog-bank! This is the Court of Chancery, which has its decaying
houses and its blighted lands in every shire, which has its worn-out lunatic in
every madhouse and its dead in every churchyard, which has its ruined suitor
with his slipshod heels and threadbare dress borrowing and begging through the
round of every man's acquaintance, which gives to 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 eyeglass 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!