Bleak House

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 foothold 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.

Dinner was over, and my godmother and I were sitting at the table before the fire. The clock ticked, the fire clicked; not another sound had been heard in the room or in the house for I don’t know how long. I happened to look timidly up from my stitching, across the table at my godmother, and I saw in her face, looking gloomily at me, “It would have been far better, little Esther, that you had had no birthday, that you had never been born!”

I broke out crying and sobbing, and I said, “Oh, dear godmother, tell me, pray do tell me, did Mama die on my birthday?”

“No,” she returned. “Ask me no more, child!”

“Oh, do pray tell me something of her. Do now, at last, dear godmother, if you please! What did I do to her? How did I lose her? Why am I so different from other children, and why is it my fault, dear godmother? No, no, no, don’t go away. Oh, speak to me!”

I was in a kind of fright beyond my grief, and I caught hold of her dress and was kneeling to her. She had been saying all the while, “Let me go!” But now she stood still.

I thought of my dead godmother, of the night when I read to her, of her frowning so fixedly and sternly in her bed, of the strange place I was going to, of the people I should find there, and what they would be like, and what they would say to me, when a voice in the coach gave me a terrible start.

It said, “What the de-vil are you crying for?”

I was so frightened that I lost my voice and could only answer in a whisper, “Me, sir?” For of course I knew it must have been the gentleman in the quantity of wrappings, though he was still looking out of his window.

“Yes, you,” he said, turning round.

“I didn’t know I was crying, sir,” I faltered.

“But you are!” said the gentleman. “Look here!” He came quite opposite to me from the other corner of the coach, brushed one of his large furry cuffs across my eyes (but without hurting me), and showed me that it was wet.

“There! Now you know you are,” he said. “Don’t you?”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“And what are you crying for?” said the gentleman, “Don’t you want to go there?”

“Where, sir?”

“Where? Why, wherever you are going,” said the gentleman.

“I am very glad to go there, sir,” I answered.

“Well, then! Look glad!” said the gentleman.

“Miss Summerson,” said Richard hurriedly, “I am glad you are come. You will be able to advise us. Our friend Mr. Skimpole⁠—don’t be alarmed!⁠—is arrested for debt.”

“And really, my dear Miss Summerson,” said Mr. Skimpole with his agreeable candour, “I never was in a situation in which that excellent sense and quiet habit of method and usefulness, which anybody must observe in you who has the happiness of being a quarter of an hour in your society, was more needed.”

The person on the sofa, who appeared to have a cold in his head, gave such a very loud snort that he startled me.

“Are you arrested for much, sir?” I inquired of Mr. Skimpole.

“My dear Miss Summerson,” said he, shaking his head pleasantly, “I don’t know. Some pounds, odd shillings, and halfpence, I think, were mentioned.”

“It’s twenty-four pound, sixteen, and sevenpence ha’penny,” observed the stranger. “That’s wot it is.”

“And it sounds⁠—somehow it sounds,” said Mr. Skimpole, “like a small sum?”

The strange man said nothing but made another snort. It was such a powerful one that it seemed quite to lift him out of his seat.

“Mr. Skimpole,” said Richard to me, “has a delicacy in applying to my cousin Jarndyce because he has lately⁠—I think, sir, I understood you that you had lately⁠—”

“Oh, yes!” returned Mr. Skimpole, smiling. “Though I forgot how much it was and when it was. Jarndyce would readily do it again, but I have the epicure-like feeling that I would prefer a novelty in help, that I would rather,” and he looked at Richard and me, “develop generosity in a new soil and in a new form of flower.”

Oh! Here’s the boy, gentlemen!

Here he is, very muddy, very hoarse, very ragged. Now, boy! But stop a minute. Caution. This boy must be put through a few preliminary paces.

Name, Jo. Nothing else that he knows on. Don’t know that everybody has two names. Never heerd of sich a think. Don’t know that Jo is short for a longer name. Thinks it long enough for him. He don’t find no fault with it. Spell it? No. he can’t spell it. No father, no mother, no friends. Never been to school. What’s home? Knows a broom’s a broom, and knows it’s wicked to tell a lie. Don’t recollect who told him about the broom or about the lie, but knows both. Can’t exactly say what’ll be done to him arter he’s dead if he tells a lie to the gentlemen here, but believes it’ll be something wery bad to punish him, and serve him right⁠—and so he’ll tell the truth.

“This won’t do, gentlemen!” says the coroner with a melancholy shake of the head.

“Don’t you think you can receive his evidence, sir?” asks an attentive juryman.

“Out of the question,” says the coroner. “You have heard the boy. ‘Can’t exactly say’ won’t do, you know. We can’t take that in a court of justice, gentlemen. It’s terrible depravity. Put the boy aside.”