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 crystal” 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,

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 butter 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.