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

CHAPTER XVI

Tom-all-Alone’s

 

My Lady Dedlock is restless, very restless. The astonished

fashionable intelligence hardly knows where to have her. To-day

she is at Chesney Wold; yesterday she was at her house in town; to-morrow she may be abroad, for anything the fashionable intelligence

can with confidence predict. Even Sir Leicester’s gallantry has

some trouble to keep pace with her. It would have more but that

his other faithful ally, for better and for worse—the gout—darts

into the old oak bed-chamber at Chesney Wold and grips him by both

legs.

 

Sir Leicester receives the gout as a troublesome demon, but still a

demon of the patrician order. All the Dedlocks, in the direct male

line, through a course of time during and beyond which the memory

of man goeth not to the contrary, have had the gout. It can be

proved, sir. Other men’s fathers may have died of the rheumatism

or may have taken base contagion from the tainted blood of the sick

vulgar, but the Dedlock family have communicated something

exclusive even to the levelling process of dying by dying of their

own family gout. It has come down through the illustrious line

like the plate, or the pictures, or the place in Lincolnshire. It

is among their dignities. Sir Leicester is perhaps not wholly

without an impression, though he has never resolved it into words,

that the angel of death in the discharge of his necessary duties

may observe to the shades of the aristocracy, “My lords and

gentlemen, I have the honour to present to you another Dedlock

certified to have arrived per the family gout.”

 

Hence Sir Leicester yields up his family legs to the family

disorder as if he held his name and fortune on that feudal tenure.

He feels that for a Dedlock to be laid upon his back and

spasmodically twitched and stabbed in his extremities is a liberty

taken somewhere, but he thinks, “We have all yielded to this; it

belongs to us; it has for some hundreds of years been understood

that we are not to make the vaults in the park interesting on more

ignoble terms; and I submit myself to the compromise.”

 

And a goodly show he makes, lying in a flush of crimson and gold in

the midst of the great drawing-room before his favourite picture of

my Lady, with broad strips of sunlight shining in, down the long

perspective, through the long line of windows, and alternating with

soft reliefs of shadow. Outside, the stately oaks, rooted for ages

in the green ground which has never known ploughshare, but was

still a chase when kings rode to battle with sword and shield and

rode a-hunting with bow and arrow, bear witness to his greatness.

Inside, his forefathers, looking on him from the walls, say, “Each

of us was a passing reality here and left this coloured shadow of

himself and melted into remembrance as dreamy as the distant voices

of the rooks now lulling you to rest,” and hear their testimony to

his greatness too. And he is very great this day. And woe to

Boythorn or other daring wight who shall presumptuously contest an

inch with him!

 

My Lady is at present represented, near Sir Leicester, by her

portrait. She has flitted away to town, with no intention of

remaining there, and will soon flit hither again, to the confusion

of the fashionable intelligence. The house in town is not prepared

for her reception. It is muffled and dreary. Only one Mercury in

powder gapes disconsolate at the hall-window; and he mentioned last

night to another Mercury of his acquaintance, also accustomed to

good society, that if that sort of thing was to last—which it

couldn’t, for a man of his spirits couldn’t bear it, and a man of

his figure couldn’t be expected to bear it—there would be no

resource for him, upon his honour, but to cut his throat!

 

What connexion can there be between the place in Lincolnshire, the

house in town, the Mercury in powder, and the whereabout of Jo the

outlaw with the broom, who had that distant ray of light upon him

when he swept the churchyard-step? What connexion can there have

been between many people in the innumerable histories of this world

who from opposite sides of great gulfs have, nevertheless, been

very curiously brought together!

 

Jo sweeps his crossing all day long, unconscious of the link, if

any link there be. He sums up his mental condition when asked a

question by replying that he “don’t know nothink.” He knows that

it’s hard to keep the mud off the crossing in dirty weather, and

harder still to live by doing it. Nobody taught him even that

much; he found it out.

 

Jo lives—that is to say, Jo has not yet died—in a ruinous place

known to the like of him by the name of Tom-all-Alone’s. It is a

black, dilapidated street, avoided by all decent people, where the

crazy houses were seized upon, when their decay was far advanced,

by some bold vagrants who after establishing their own possession

took to letting them out in lodgings. Now, these tumbling

tenements contain, by night, a swarm of misery. As on the ruined

human wretch vermin parasites appear, so these ruined shelters have

bred a crowd of foul existence that crawls in and out of gaps in

walls and boards; and coils itself to sleep, in maggot numbers,

where the rain drips in; and comes and goes, fetching and carrying

fever and sowing more evil in its every footprint than Lord Coodle,

and Sir Thomas Doodle, and the Duke of Foodle, and all the fine

gentlemen in office, down to Zoodle, shall set right in five

hundred years—though born expressly to do it.

 

Twice lately there has been a crash and a cloud of dust, like the

springing of a mine, in Tom-all-Alone’s; and each time a house has

fallen. These accidents have made a paragraph in the newspapers

and have filled a bed or two in the nearest hospital. The gaps

remain, and there are not unpopular lodgings among the rubbish. As

several more houses are nearly ready to go, the next crash in Tom-all-Alone’s may be expected to be a good one.

 

This desirable property is in Chancery, of course. It would be an

insult to the discernment of any man with half an eye to tell him

so. Whether “Tom” is the popular representative of the original

plaintiff or defendant in Jarndyce and Jarndyce, or whether Tom

lived here when the suit had laid the street waste, all alone,

until other settlers came to join him, or whether the traditional

title is a comprehensive name for a retreat cut off from honest

company and put out of the pale of hope, perhaps nobody knows.

Certainly Jo don’t know.

 

“For I don’t,” says Jo, “I don’t know nothink.”

 

It must be a strange state to be like Jo! To shuffle through the

streets, unfamiliar with the shapes, and in utter darkness as to

the meaning, of those mysterious symbols, so abundant over the

shops, and at the corners of streets, and on the doors, and in the

windows! To see people read, and to see people write, and to see

the postmen deliver letters, and not to have the least idea of all

that language—to be, to every scrap of it, stone blind and dumb!

It must be very puzzling to see the good company going to the

churches on Sundays, with their books in their hands, and to think

(for perhaps Jo DOES think at odd times) what does it all mean, and

if it means anything to anybody, how comes it that it means nothing

to me? To be hustled, and jostled, and moved on; and really to

feel that it would appear to be perfectly true that I have no

business here, or there, or anywhere; and yet to be perplexed by

the consideration that I AM here somehow, too, and everybody

overlooked me until I became the creature that I am! It must be a

strange state, not merely to be told that I am scarcely human (as

in the case of my offering myself for a witness), but to feel it of

my own knowledge all my life! To see the horses, dogs, and cattle

go by me and to know that in ignorance I belong to them and not to

the superior beings in my shape, whose delicacy I offend! Jo’s

ideas of a criminal trial, or a judge, or a bishop, or a government,

or that inestimable jewel to him (if he only knew it) the

Constitution, should be strange! His whole material and immaterial

life is wonderfully strange; his death, the strangest thing of all.

 

Jo comes out of Tom-all-Alone’s, meeting the tardy morning which is

always late in getting down there, and munches his dirty bit of

bread as he comes along. His way lying through many streets, and

the houses not yet being open, he sits down to breakfast on the

door-step of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in

Foreign Parts and gives it a brush when he has finished as an

acknowledgment of the accommodation. He admires the size of the

edifice and wonders what it’s all about. He has no idea, poor

wretch, of the spiritual destitution of a coral reef in the Pacific

or what it costs to look up the precious souls among the coco-nuts

and bread-fruit.

 

He goes to his