The Solitary House (With Bonus Novels Bleak House and the Woman in White)

by Lynn Shepherd

  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 a 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, and I can quite understand that to your excited feelings I may appear, at such times as the present, insensible. My daughters may know me better; my aged father may know me better. But they have known me much longer than you have, and the confiding eye of affection is not the distrustful eye of business. Not that I complain, sir, of the eye of business being distrustful; quite the contrary. In attending to your interests, I wish to have all possible checks upon me; it is right that I should have them; I court inquiry. But your interests demand that I should be cool and methodical, Mr. Carstone; and I cannot be otherwise—no, sir, not even to please you.”

  Mr. Vholes, after glancing at the official cat who is patiently watching a mouse’s hole, fixes his charmed gaze again on his young client, and proceeds in his buttoned-up half-audible voice, as if there were an unclean spirit in him that will neither come out nor speak out:

  “What are you to do, sir, you inquire, during the vacation. I should hope you gentlemen of the army may find many means of amusing yourselves, if you give your minds to it. If you had asked me what I was to do, during the vacation, I could have answered you more readily. I am to attend to your interests. I am to be found here, day by day, attending to your interests. That is my duty, Mr. C.; and term-time or vacation makes no difference to me. If you wish to consult me as to your interests, you will find me here at all times alike. Other professional men go out of town. I don’t. Not that I blame them for going; I merely say, I don’t go. This desk is your rock, sir!”

  Mr. Vholes gives it a rap, and it sounds as hollow as a coffin. Not to Richard, though. There is encouragement in the sound to him. Perhaps Mr. Vholes knows there is.

  “I am perfectly aware, Mr. Vholes,” says Richard, more familiarly and good-humouredly, “that you are the most reliable fellow in the world; and that to have to do with you, is to have to do with a man of business who is not to be hoodwinked. But put yourself in my case, dragging on this dislocated life, sinking deeper and deeper into difficulty every day, continually hoping and continually disappointed, conscious of change upon change for the worse in myself, and of no change for the better in anything else; and you will find it a dark-looking case sometimes, as I do.”

  “You know,” says Mr. Vholes, “that I never give hopes, sir. I told you from the first, Mr. C., that I never give hopes. Particularly in a case like this, where the greater part of the costs comes out of the estate, I should not be considerate of my good name, if I gave hopes. It might seem as if costs were my object. Still, when you say there is no change for the better, I must, as a bare matter of fact, deny that.”

  “Aye?” returns Richard, brightening. “But how do you make it out?”

  “Mr. Carstone, you are represented by—”

  “You said just now—a rock.”

  “Yes, sir,” says Mr. Vholes, gently shaking his head and rapping the hollow desk, with a sound as if ashes were falling on ashes, and dust on dust, “a rock. That’s something. You are separately represented, and no longer hidden and lost in the interests of others. That’s something. The suit does not sleep; we wake it up, we air it, we walk it about. That’s something. It’s not all Jarndyce, in fact as well as in name. That’s something. Nobody has it all his own way now, sir. And that’s something, surely.”

  Richard, his face flushing suddenly, strikes the desk with his clenched hand.

  “Mr. Vholes! If any man had told me, when I first went to John Jarndyce’s house, that he was anything but the disinterested friend he seemed—that he was what he has gradually turned out to be—I could have found no words strong enough to repel the slander; I could not have defended him too ardently. So little did I know of the world! Whereas, now, I do declare to you that he becomes to me the embodiment of the suit; that, in place of its being an abstraction, it is John Jarndyce; that the more I suffer, the more indignant I am with him; that every new delay, and every new disappointment, is only a new injury from John Jarndyce’s hand.”

  “No, no,” says Vholes. “Don’t say so. We ought to have patience, all of us. Besides, I never disparage, sir. I never disparage.”

  “Mr. Vholes,” returns the angry client. “You know as well as I, that he would have strangled the suit if he could.”

  “He was not active in it,” Mr. Vholes admits, with an appearance of reluctance. “He certainly was not active in it. But however, but however, he might have had amiable intentions. Who can read the heart, Mr. C.?”

  “You can,” returns Richard.

  “I, Mr. C.?”

  “Well enough to know what his intentions were. Are or are not our interests conflicting? Tell—me—that!” says Richard, accompanying his last three words with three raps on his rock of trust.

  “Mr. C.,” returns Vholes, immovable in attitude and never winking his hungry eyes, “I should be wanting in my duty as your professional adviser, I should be departing from my fidelity to your interests, if I represented those interests as
identical with the interests of Mr. Jarndyce. They are no such thing, sir. I never impute motives; I both have, and am, a father, and I never impute motives. But I must not shrink from a professional duty, even if it sows dissensions in families. I understand you to be now consulting me professionally, as to your interests? You are so? I reply then, they are not identical with those of Mr. Jarndyce.”

  “Of course they are not!” cries Richard. “You found that out, long ago.”

  “Mr. C.,” returns Vholes, “I wish to say no more of any third party than is necessary. I wish to leave my good name unsullied, together with any little property of which I may become possessed through industry and perseverance, to my daughters Emma, Jane, and Caroline. I also desire to live in amity with my professional brethren. When Mr. Skimpole did me the honour, sir—I will not say the very high honour, for I never stoop to flattery—of bringing us together in this room, I mentioned to you that I could offer no opinion or advice as to your interests, while those interests were entrusted to another member of the profession. And I spoke in such terms as I was bound to speak of Kenge and Carboy’s office, which stands high. You, sir, thought fit to withdraw your interests from that keeping nevertheless, and to offer them to me. You brought them with clean hands, sir, and I accepted them with clean hands. Those interests are now paramount in this office. My digestive functions, as you may have heard me mention, are not in a good state, and rest might improve them; but I shall not rest, sir, while I am your representative. Whenever you want me, you will find me here. Summon me anywhere, and I will come. During the long vacation, sir, I shall devote my leisure to studying your interests more and more closely, and to making arrangements for moving heaven and earth (including, of course, the Chancellor) after Michaelmas term; and when I ultimately congratulate you, sir,” says Mr. Vholes, with the severity of a determined man, “when I ultimately congratulate you, sir, with all my heart, on your accession to fortune—which, but that I never give hopes, I might say something further about—you will owe me nothing, beyond whatever little balance may be then outstanding of the costs as between solicitor and client, not included in the taxed costs allowed out of the estate. I pretend to no claim upon you, Mr. C., but for the zealous and active discharge—not the languid and routine discharge, sir: that much credit I stipulate for—of my professional duty. My duty prosperously ended, all between us is ended.”

  Vholes finally adds, by way of rider to this declaration of his principles, that as Mr. Carstone is about to rejoin his regiment, perhaps Mr. C. will favour him with an order on his agent for twenty pounds on account.

  “For there have been many little consultations and attendances of late, sir,” observes Vholes, turning over the leaves of his Diary, “and these things mount up, and I don’t profess to be a man of capital. When we first entered on our present relations, I stated to you openly—it is a principle of mine that there never can be too much openness between solicitor and client—that I was not a man of capital; and that if capital was your object, you had better leave your papers in Kenge’s office. No, Mr. C., you will find none of the advantages, or disadvantages, of capital here, sir. This,” Vholes gives the desk one hollow blow again, “is your rock; it pretends to be nothing more.”

  The client, with his dejection insensibly relieved, and his vague hopes rekindled, takes pen and ink and writes the draft; not without perplexed consideration and calculation of the date it may bear, implying scant effect in the agent’s hands. All the while, Vholes, buttoned up in body and mind, looks at him attentively. All the while, Vholes’s official cat watches the mouse’s hole.

  Lastly, the client, shaking hands, beseeches Mr. Vholes, for Heaven’s sake and Earth’s sake, to do his utmost to “pull him through” the Court of Chancery. Mr. Vholes, who never gives hopes, lays his palm upon the client’s shoulder, and answers with a smile, “Always here, sir. Personally, or by letter, you will always find me here, sir, with my shoulder to the wheel.” Thus they part; and Vholes, left alone, employs himself in carrying sundry little matters out of his Diary into his draft bill book, for the ultimate behoof of his three daughters. So might an industrious fox, or bear, make up his accounts of chickens or stray travellers with an eye to his cubs; not to disparage by that word the three raw-visaged, lank, and buttoned-up maidens, who dwell with the parent Vholes in an earthy cottage situated in a damp garden at Kennington.

  Richard, emerging from the heavy shade of Symond’s Inn into the sunshine of Chancery Lane—for there happens to be sunshine there today—walks thoughtfully on, and turns into Lincoln’s Inn, and passes under the shadow of the Lincoln’s Inn trees. On many such loungers have the speckled shadows of those trees often fallen; on the like bent head, the bitten nail, the lowering eye, the lingering step, the purposeless and dreamy air, the good consuming and consumed, the life turned sour. This lounger is not shabby yet, but that may come. Chancery, which knows no wisdom but in Precedent, is very rich in such Precedents; and why should one be different from ten thousand?

  Yet the time is so short since his depreciation began, that as he saunters away, reluctant to leave the spot for some long months together, though he hates it, Richard himself may feel his own case as if it were a startling one. While his heart is heavy with corroding care, suspense, distrust, and doubt, it may have room for some sorrowful wonder when he recalls how different his first visit there, how different he, how different all the colours of his mind. But injustice breeds injustice; the fighting with shadows and being defeated by them, necessitates the setting up of substances to combat; from the impalpable suit which no man alive can understand, the time for that being long gone by, it has become a gloomy relief to turn to the palpable figure of the friend who would have saved him from this ruin, and make him his enemy. Richard has told Vholes the truth. Is he in a hardened or a softened mood, he still lays his injuries equally at that door; he was thwarted, in that quarter, of a set purpose, and that purpose could only originate in the one subject that is resolving his existence into itself; besides, it is a justification to him in his own eyes to have an embodied antagonist and oppressor.

  Is Richard a monster in all this—or would Chancery be found rich in such Precedents too, if they could be got for citation from the Recording Angel?

  Two pairs of eyes not unused to such people look after him and biting his nails and brooding, he crosses the square, and is swallowed up by the shadow of the southern gateway. Mr. Guppy and Mr. Weevle are the possessors of those eyes, and they have been leaning in conversation against the low stone parapet under the trees. He passes close by them, seeing nothing but the ground.

  “William,” says Mr. Weevle, adjusting his whiskers; “there’s combustion going on here! It’s not a case of Spontaneous, but it’s smouldering combustion it is.”

  “Ah!” says Mr. Guppy. “He wouldn’t keep out of Jarndyce, and I suppose he’s over head and ears in debt. I never knew much of him. He was as high as the Monument when he was on trial at our place. A good riddance to me, whether a clerk or client. Well, Tony, that as I was mentioning is what they’re up to.”

  Mr. Guppy, refolding his arms, resettles himself against the parapet, as resuming a conversation of interest.

  “They are still up to it, sir,” says Mr. Guppy, “still taking stock, still examining papers, still going over the heaps and heaps of rubbish. At this rate they’ll be at it these seven years.”

  “And Small is helping?”

  “Small left us at a week’s notice. Told Kenge, his grandfather’s business was too much for the old gentleman, and he could better himself by undertaking it. There had been a coolness between myself and Small on account of his being so close. But he said you and I began it; and as he had me there—for we did—I put our acquaintance on the old footing. That’s how I come to know what they’re up to.”

  “You haven’t looked in at all?”

  “Tony,” says Mr. Guppy, a little disconcerted, “to be unreserved with you, I don’t greatly relish the house, except
in your company, and therefore I have not; and therefore I proposed this little appointment for our fetching away your things. There goes the hour by the clock! Tony”; Mr. Guppy becomes mysteriously and tenderly eloquent; “it is necessary that I should impress upon your mind once more, that circumstances over which I have no control, have made a melancholy alteration in my most cherished plans, and in that unrequited image which I formerly mentioned to you as a friend. That image is shattered, and that idol is laid low. My only wish now, in connexion with the objects which I had an idea of carrying out in the court, with your aid as a friend, is to let ’em alone and bury ’em in oblivion. Do you think it possible, do you think it at all likely (I put it to you, Tony, as a friend), from your knowledge of that capricious and deep old character who fell a prey to the—Spontaneous element; do you, Tony, think it at all likely that, on second thoughts, he put those letters away anywhere, after you saw him alive, and that they were not destroyed that night?”

  Mr. Weevle reflects for some time. Shakes his head. Decidedly thinks not.

  “Tony,” says Mr. Guppy, as they walk towards the court, “once again understand me, as a friend. Without entering into further explanations, I may repeat that the idol is down. I have no purpose to serve now, but burial in oblivion. To that I have pledged myself. I owe it to myself, and I owe it to the shattered image, as also to the circumstances over which I have no control. If you was to express to me by a gesture, by a wink, that you saw lying anywhere in your late lodgings, any papers that so much as looked like the papers in question, I would pitch them into the fire, sir, on my own responsibility.”

  Mr. Weevle nods. Mr. Guppy, much elevated in his own opinion by having delivered these observations, with an air in part forensic and in part romantic—this gentleman having a passion for conducting anything in the form of an examination, or delivering anything in the form of summing up or a speech—accompanies his friend with dignity to the court.