Bleak House by Charles Dickens (the top 100 crime novels of all time .txt) 📖

CHAPTER XXXIX

Attorney and Client

 

The name of Mr. Vholes, preceded by the legend Ground-Floor, is

inscribed upon a door-post in Symond’s Inn, Chancery Lane—a

little, pale, wall-eyed, woebegone inn like a large dust-binn of

two compartments and a sifter. It looks as if Symond were a

sparing man in his way and constructed his inn of old building

materials which took kindly to the dry rot and to dirt and all

things decaying and dismal, and perpetuated Symond’s memory with

congenial shabbiness. Quartered in this dingy hatchment

commemorative of Symond are the legal bearings of Mr. Vholes.

 

Mr. Vholes’s office, in disposition retiring and in situation

retired, is squeezed up in a corner and blinks at a dead wall.

Three feet of knotty-floored dark passage bring the client to Mr.

Vholes’s jet-black door, in an angle profoundly dark on the

brightest midsummer morning and encumbered by a black bulk-head of

cellarage staircase against which belated civilians generally

strike their brows. Mr. Vholes’s chambers are on so small a scale

that one clerk can open the door without getting off his stool,

while the other who elbows him at the same desk has equal

facilities for poking the fire. A smell as of unwholesome sheep

blending with the smell of must and dust is referable to the

nightly (and often daily) consumption of mutton fat in candles and

to the fretting of parchment forms and skins in greasy drawers.

The atmosphere is otherwise stale and close. The place was last

painted or whitewashed beyond the memory of man, and the two

chimneys smoke, and there is a loose outer surface of soot

everywhere, and the dull cracked windows in their heavy frames have

but one piece of character in them, which is a determination to be

always dirty and always shut unless coerced. This accounts for the

phenomenon of the weaker of the two usually having a bundle of

firewood thrust between its jaws in hot weather.

 

Mr. Vholes is a very respectable man. He has not a large business,

but he is a very respectable man. He is allowed by the greater

attorneys who have made good fortunes or are making them to be a

most respectable man. He never misses a chance in his practice,

which is a mark of respectability. He never takes any pleasure,

which is another mark of respectability. He is reserved and

serious, which is another mark of respectability. His digestion is

impaired, which is highly respectable. And he is making hay of the

grass which is flesh, for his three daughters. And his father is

dependent on him in the Vale of Taunton.

 

The one great principle of the English law is to make business for

itself. There is no other principle distinctly, certainly, and

consistently maintained through all its narrow turnings. Viewed by

this light it becomes a coherent scheme and not the monstrous maze

the laity are apt to think it. Let them but once clearly perceive

that its grand principle is to make business for itself at their

expense, and surely they will cease to grumble.

 

But not perceiving this quite plainly—only seeing it by halves in a

confused way—the laity sometimes suffer in peace and pocket, with a

bad grace, and DO grumble very much. Then this respectability of

Mr. Vholes is brought into powerful play against them. “Repeal this

statute, my good sir?” says Mr. Kenge to a smarting client. “Repeal

it, my dear sir? Never, with my consent. Alter this law, sir, and

what will be the effect of your rash proceeding on a class of

practitioners very worthily represented, allow me to say to you, by

the opposite attorney in the case, Mr. Vholes? Sir, that class of

practitioners would be swept from the face of the earth. Now you

cannot afford—I will say, the social system cannot afford—to lose

an order of men like Mr. Vholes. Diligent, persevering, steady,

acute in business. My dear sir, I understand your present feelings

against the existing state of things, which I grant to be a little

hard in your case; but I can never raise my voice for the demolition

of a class of men like Mr. Vholes.” The respectability of Mr.

Vholes has even been cited with crushing effect before Parliamentary

committees, as in the following blue minutes of a distinguished

attorney’s evidence. “Question (number five hundred and seventeen

thousand eight hundred and sixty-nine): If I understand you, these

forms of practice indisputably occasion delay? Answer: Yes, some

delay. Question: And great expense? Answer: Most assuredly they

cannot be gone through for nothing. Question: And unspeakable

vexation? Answer: I am not prepared to say that. They have never

given ME any vexation; quite the contrary. Question: But you think

that their abolition would damage a class of practitioners? Answer:

I have no doubt of it. Question: Can you instance any type of that

class? Answer: Yes. I would unhesitatingly mention Mr. Vholes.

He would be ruined. Question: Mr. Vholes is considered, in the

profession, a respectable man? Answer:”—which proved fatal to the

inquiry for ten years—“Mr. Vholes is considered, in the profession,

a MOST respectable man.”

 

So in familiar conversation, private authorities no less

disinterested will remark that they don’t know what this age is

coming to, that we are plunging down precipices, that now here is

something else gone, that these changes are death to people like

Vholes—a man of undoubted respectability, with a father in the

Vale of Taunton, and three daughters at home. Take a few steps

more in this direction, say they, and what is to become of Vholes’s

father? Is he to perish? And of Vholes’s daughters? Are they to

be shirt-makers, or governesses? As though, Mr. Vholes and his

relations being minor cannibal chiefs and it being proposed to

abolish cannibalism, indignant champions were to put the case thus:

Make man-eating unlawful, and you starve the Vholeses!

 

In a word, Mr. Vholes, with his three daughters and his father in

the Vale of Taunton, is continually doing duty, like a piece of

timber, to shore up some decayed foundation that has become a

pitfall and a nuisance. And with a great many people in a great

many instances, the question is never one of a change from wrong to

right (which is quite an extraneous consideration), but is always

one of injury or advantage to that eminently respectable legion,

Vholes.

 

The Chancellor is, within these ten minutes, “up” for the long

vacation. Mr. Vholes, and his young client, and several blue bags

hastily stuffed out of all regularity of form, as the larger sort

of serpents are in their first gorged state, have returned to the

official den. Mr. Vholes, quiet and unmoved, as a man of so much

respectability ought to be, takes off his close black gloves as if

he were skinning his hands, lifts off his tight hat as if he were

scalping himself, and sits down at his desk. The client throws his

hat and gloves upon the ground—tosses them anywhere, without

looking after them or caring where they go; flings himself into a

chair, half sighing and half groaning; rests his aching head upon

his hand and looks the portrait of young despair.

 

“Again nothing done!” says Richard. “Nothing, nothing done!”

 

“Don’t say nothing done, sir,” returns the placid Vholes. “That is

scarcely fair, sir, scarcely fair!”

 

“Why, what IS done?” says Richard, turning gloomily upon him.

 

“That may not be the whole question,” returns Vholes, “The question

may branch off into what is doing, what is doing?”

 

“And what is doing?” asks the moody client.

 

Vholes, sitting with his arms on the desk, quietly bringing the

tips of his five right fingers to meet the tips of his five left

fingers, and quietly separating them again, and fixedly and slowly

looking at his client, replies, “A good deal is doing, sir. We

have put our shoulders to the wheel, Mr. Carstone, and the wheel is

going round.”

 

“Yes, with Ixion on it. How am I to get through the next four or

five accursed months?” exclaims the young man, rising from his

chair and walking about the room.

 

“Mr. C.,” returns Vholes, following him close with his eyes

wherever he goes, “your spirits are hasty, and I am sorry for it on

your account. Excuse me if I recommend you not to chafe so much,

not to be so impetuous, not to wear yourself out so. You should

have more patience. You should sustain yourself better.”

 

“I ought to imitate you, in fact, Mr. Vholes?” says Richard,

sitting down again with an impatient laugh and beating the devil’s

tattoo with his boot on the patternless carpet.

 

“Sir,” returns Vholes, always looking at the client as if he were

making a lingering meal of him with his eyes as well as with his

professional appetite. “Sir,” returns Vholes with his inward

manner of speech and his bloodless quietude, “I should not have had

the presumption to propose myself as a model for your imitation or

any man’s. Let me but leave the good name to my three daughters,

and that is enough for me; I am not a self-seeker. But since you

mention me so pointedly, I will acknowledge that I should like to

impart to you a little of my—come, sir, you are disposed to call

it insensibility, and I am sure I have no objection—say

insensibility—a little of my insensibility.”

 

“Mr. Vholes,” explains the client, somewhat abashed, “I had no

intention to accuse you of insensibility.”

 

“I think you had, sir, without knowing it,” returns the equable

Vholes. “Very naturally. It is my duty to attend to your

interests with a cool head,