Mad: A Story of Dust and Ashes

“I’m gallussed!” muttered Mr Jarker, trying to look unconcerned, and slouching on; and it was observable that though Mr Jarker looked straight before him and whistled, the policemen, one and all, looked very hard at Mr Jarker, as if they knew him and felt hurt at his pride; while one man was even seen to wink to himself, and smile a very peculiar, hard smile – the kind of smile only seen upon policemen’s faces, and one that means so much that its interpretation would be a task of difficulty.

“I’m gallussed!” muttered Mr Jarker again, when he was well past the men in uniform, and then, apparently satisfied with the length of his morning walk, he took a short cut to make his way back to Bennett’s-rents, while, upon thus once more having his thoughts directed homeward, he again muttered – “It must have been arter the dawg.”

Volume One – Chapter Four.

With the Dragon’s Teeth

In the gloomiest part of that gloomy street called Carey, and in the darkest corner of his printing-office, sat Septimus Hardon. The dragon’s teeth and their appurtenances lay around, but all thickly covered with that strange black dust peculiar to the region; the dust compounded of who can tell what, as it rests on every ledge, and settles thickly upon every article in room or workshop, office or chamber. Business had not prospered with Septimus, though his place looked business-like, save for the animation that a few moving figures would have lent to it, while for position it was all that could be desired. But the star of Septimus Hardon was not in the ascendant. With the knowledge full upon him that he must work to keep the wife and child he had taken to his breast upon leaving Somesham, he had adopted the trade which seemed most congenial from the little knowledge that he possessed; but as the years passed on, leaving him poorer, and with increased expenses, he grew hopeless, helpless, and, if it were possible, less fitted than ever for fighting his way amidst the busy throngs of the great city. At times, almost in despair, he would go forth into the streets of the busy hive and canvass for work; but he always carried with him an atmosphere of his own, so quiet, strange, and retiring a manner, that his very appearance invited either pity or rebuff, and often and often, when tired out, he would return to his wife for the comfort that she, grown more sickly than ever, could ill afford to give.

But Septimus seldom complained, and there was always a pleasant smile for Lucy Grey, now grown a blooming girl, the mainstay of the family for cheerfulness, and the constant attendant of her invalid mother; and, in spite of her years, almost taking the place of parent to the two children, the fruit of Septimus Hardon’s marriage.

And now, after long years of straggling, Septimus sat thinking of the state of his affairs, of the rent he had to make up, and the silence of his father in spite of the many humble appeals that he had made to him for help. Mattering and calculating, with a piece of paper and a pencil, he suddenly stopped short, for he saw that he was not alone, and shuffling off his high stool he hurried towards the new-comer, in the hope that some solicitor had sent orders for some large amount of work, or that, better still, an estimate was wanted for a new magazine.

“Any chance of a job, sir?” said the new-comer, who might have been Septimus Hardon twenty years older, and more shabby. There was ‘old compositor’ oozing out of him at every corner, and the corners in his person were many; he smelt of stale tobacco-smoke, and he was taking almost his last pinch of snuff out of a dirty piece of paper, with his long, lithe, active fingers as Septimus Hardon approached him. A shabby black frock-coat was buttoned tightly to his chin; his shiny black trousers had the gloss of age thick upon them; Wellington boots were upon his feet that rivalled his tall hat for dilapidations; old, sallow, dirty, and wild-looking, he was not the man a master would have employed unless from some latent idea that he suited the district. “Any chance of a job, sir?”

Septimus Hardon shook his head and sighed, which was, to say the least of it, unbusiness-like.

The old man echoed the sigh, leaned one hand upon the case of type at his elbow, and began to finger the letters, bringing up the bright unused types from the bottom of the boxes. He then sighed again, took in at one glance the fittings of the office, and ended by fixing his eyes upon the owner.

“Might do a deal of work with all this, sir.”

Septimus Hardon nodded drearily, and sighed again, instead of promptly ordering the man off his premises.

“Yes; should be glad of an hour’s work or so, sir. Seems hard here in this world of ours that when a man’s ready and willing to work he can’t get it to do, sir; don’t it?”

Septimus nodded, and looked hard at the man, thinking how his was after all the worse lot.

“I’m faint, sir,” continued the old printer, “and hungry, and hard up;” and then he looked down at his clothes with a dreary smile upon his grim, unshorn face.

“I would give you work with pleasure,” said Septimus; “but I might as well close the office for all that comes to my share.”

The man scraped the last of his snuff out of the shabby piece of newspaper, and lost it all beneath his long dirty finger and thumb-nails; when, not to disappoint his itching organ, he ran a lean finger along a ledge where dust lay thick, and administered it to his nose in an absent way, snapped his fingers loudly to get rid of the residue, and then slowly turned to go; but, on reaching the door, he faced round again:

“If you’d stand an advance of a shilling, sir, I’d come honestly another time and work it out; for I am hard up, sir, and no mistake.”

Mistake there certainly was none; but shillings were then scarce things with Septimus Hardon. A shilling, the sum tossed carelessly to the cabman for a few hundred yards’ ride, meant, perhaps, the dinner of himself and family; and he knew in his heart that the odds were very long against his ever seeing man or shilling again; but there was so great a knowledge of want in his heart that he could not bear to see it in others, and almost the last shilling in his pocket was slipped into the visitor’s hand.

The old printer took the money with his trembling fingers; looked at it, then at the donor; tried to speak, but choked over it; and then, with something like a maundering tear in each eye, he shuffled out of the office, taking with him: The solicitor’s work; The magazine estimate; and, most needed of all, Septimus Hardon’s shilling.

There was so little weight in the pocket before, that the shilling was not missed; and in spite of the black look of his affairs there was something in the act which made Septimus Hardon’s heart feel light as his pocket, as, thrusting his papers into the desk and locking it, he went and stood before a piece of looking-glass and stretched his face to take out the care-wrinkles, smiled two or three times to give a pleasant tarnish to his countenance, and then, loudly humming a tune, he hurried up to the first-floor, where Mrs Septimus, Lucy, and the children, were located.

Carey-street was a most desirable place for residence or business, as any landlord would have told you in the old days, before the houses I write of were carted away by contractors, and huge law-courts threatened in their stead. Lucy Grey knew the place now by heart. There was generally something out of the common way to be seen there, in spite of the place being so retired and its echoes so seldom disturbed by carriages, unless by those of the judges, when coachman and footman thought it advisable to wash down the legal dust of the place by copious draughts of porter at the Barley Mow or the Blue Horse. The dust-cart – that hearse for bearing off the remains of many a dancing, merry, cheery fire – might be seen there in the morning; and at every cloud of dust raised by the emptying of the fantail man’s basket, scraps of parchment and torn folios of cold, bitter cold crabbed writing, were caught up by the fierce winds of the place, and away they went scudding down the street, to the amusement of Septimus Hardon’s children; for the mocking wind tossed the scraps on high, as if to show how light and empty they were. Interesting words they were too, mostly about “our client” and his “heirs, executors, administrators, and assigns;” while of a morning the man whom Septimus Hardon himself knew well as a class, “our client” himself, might be seen in the streets; now early in his suit – Chancery suit, perhaps, – wrapped in it and looking busy and important, glossy and shiny, and, on the whole, apparently liking it. Now with the suit old and shabby, with the pocket-holes frayed and worn with the passage in and out of papers – papers always without end, while the owner crept along, dejected and dismal as Septimus himself, ready at times to enter his office, and sit down and make him the repository of the fact that he hoped the Lord Chancellor or his Vice will give judgment next week. Now he went along, silent and thoughtful; now he brightened up and became energetic, and gesticulated to an audience composed of the apple-woman at the corner, who sat there beneath the lamp summer and winter, like some dowdy old hen in a nest, for her lower extremities were all tightly tucked in a worn sieve-basket.

“Our client” generally went into Carey-street to eat his sandwiches; now looking crumby, now crusty, as the case might be, while he paced irresolutely up and down, or round into the Lane or Portugal-street, or even into the Fields for a change, to gaze at the trees beyond those railings, upon every spike of which a disappointed or broken heart might be stuck by way of ornament. As before said, “our client” had generally plenty of papers with him; some yellow and frayed, some new, but all carefully tied with red tape, which by its friction has a wonderful effect upon black-kid gloves, soon wearing out the fingers, as the papers are untied in doorways for reference while the tape-string is held in the mouth.

“Our client” was decidedly the principal object of interest in Carey-street; but there were thin, clever, cold-looking lawyers; thin, cold, and underpaid clerks, blue-bag bearing; portly thick clerks, warm, glossy, and gold-chained, red-bag bearing – bags gasping and choking fearfully with their contents – choking horribly with the papers thrust into them, sticking out of their very mouths; long-headed barristers, whose eyes seemed to have turned cold and oysterish – meaningless, and as if gazing within – men upon whose long heads briefs rained incessantly; men in gowns, men bewigged, and with the insignia of their rank put on all ways – straight, crooked, here awry, and there awry, with the frontal apex descending upon the nose, and the caudal beauty behind raised at right angles to display the undergrowth, black, brown, grey, or sandy, or perhaps resting upon the nape of the wearer’s neck, with the tails beating a white powdery tune upon his back, like a hare’s feet upon a tabor; shabby witnesses, shabby porters, shabby inhabitants; dirt everywhere, and a sharp, gritty, pouncey dust flying before the wind to bring tears into the eyes.

Lucy Grey knew all this by heart, and so did Septimus Hardon’s children – lessons learned from the windows, or during their walks, when Lucy showed them the wonders of the shops at hand, and that ever-banging, restless door where the shabby law-writers went in and out, night and day; the three wigs resting upon as many blockheads – wooden blockheads – new, fresh, and cool for their future wearers; the works in the law-booksellers’, all bound in dismal paper, or Desert-of-Sahara-coloured leather – law-calf – Tidd on this, Todd on that, Equity Reports, Chancery Practice, Common Law, Statutes at Large, Justice of the Peace, Stone’s Manual. Law everywhere: Simson, tin deed-box manufacturer; Bodgers, deeds copied; Screw, law-writer; Bird, office-furniture warehouse – valuations for probate; S Hardon, legal and general printer; while, like a shade at the end of the street, stood the great hospital, where the wan faces of patients might be seen gazing up at the sky, towards where the clouds scudded before the wind, hurrying to be once more in the country. Away they went, each one a very chariot, bearing with it the thoughts of the prisoned ones – captives from sickness, or poverty, or business. There were faces here at the hospital that would smile, and heads that would nod to Septimus Hardon’s little golden-haired children when Lucy held them up; when perchance the patient went back to sit upon some iron bedstead’s edge, and tell some fellow-sufferer of the bright vision she had seen, – a vision of angels in the legal desert.

With such surroundings, no one upon entering Septimus Hardon’s rooms would have been surprised to see Mrs Septimus careworn, and lying upon a shabby couch, and the children slight and fragile. The rooms were close, heavy, and dull, heavy-windowed, heavy-panelled, earthy-smelling, and cryptish, as though the dust of dead-and-gone suitors lay thick in the place. There was but little accommodation for the heavy rent he paid; and Septimus Hardon looked uneasily from face to face, crushing down the sorrowful thoughts that tried to rise; for in that close room there was not space for more than one complaining soul. Mrs Septimus told of her troubles often enough; and Septimus felt that his task was to cheer. Still, it was hard work when he had to think of the landlord and the rent; the landlord who, when he complained of this said rent, told him to look at the situation; which Septimus Hardon did, and sighed; and then, by way of raising his spirits, took down and read the copies of the letters he had from time to time sent to his father, unanswered one and all; and then he sighed again, and wondered how it would all end.

Volume One – Chapter Five.

A Pair of Shoes

This is a world of change; but the time was when you could turn by Saint Clement’s Church, from the roar of the waves of life in the Strand, and make your way between a baked-potato can – perspiring violently in its efforts to supply the demands made upon it – and a tin of hot eels, steaming in a pasty mud; then under a gateway, past old-clothes shops and marine-store dealers; thread your way along between crooked tumbledown houses in dismal fever-breeding lanes, which led you into the far-famed region of Lincoln’s-inn, where law stared you in the face at every turn. It will doubtless behave in as barefaced a manner to you at the present day; but you will have to approach it by a different route, for the auctioneer’s hammer has given those preliminary taps that herald the knocking-down of a vast collection of the houses of old London; and perhaps ere these sheets are in the press, first stones will be laid of the buildings to occupy the site as law-courts. But take we the region as it was, with its frowsy abodes and their tenants. They are clipped away now; but in every direction, crowding in upon the great inns of court, were dilapidated houses pressing upon it like miserable suitors asking for their rights, or like rags of the great legal gown. But it is a rare place is Lincoln’s-inn – a place where the law is rampant, and the names of its disciples are piled in monuments upon the door-posts – a place where you may pick your legal adviser according to the length of your purse. The doors stand open, and the halls are cold, cheerless, and echoing, while the large carven keystone looks down at the entering client with its stony eyes, which seem to wink and ogle as the sly, sneering, tongue-thrusting image apparently chuckles at the folly of man. The cold shivers are always out in Lincoln’s-inn, and they attack you the moment you enter the precincts; probably they are spirits of past-and-gone suitors, in past-and-gone suits, wandering to avenge themselves upon the legal fraternity by freezing the courage of litigants and turning them back when about to perform that wholesale shovelling of an estate into the legal dust-cart known as “throwing it into Chancery.” Cold stone posts stand at intervals along the sides of the square, looking, in their grey, bleak misery, like to stripped and bare clients waiting for redress at their legal advisers’ doors. A dreary place for an assignation, if your friend possesses not the virtue of punctuality; for the eye wanders in vain for some pleasant oasis where it may rest. You have not here in autumn those melancholy, washed-out flowers – the chrysanthemums of the Temple, but you may gaze through prison-like bars at soot-dusted grass – verdure apparently splashed with ink from the surrounding offices; at the trees, adapted by nature to the circumstances of their fate; for, as in the arctic zone the thinly-clad animals grow furry as a protection from the cold, so here, in this region of law costs and voluminous writing, the trees put forth twigs and sprays of a sharp spiky nature, a compromise between porcupine penholders and a chevaux de frise, to enable them to set attack at defiance.

Enter one house here, and you would have found upon the ground-floor your QC or Serjeant – Brother So-and-so as he is so affectionately called by the judge; upon the first-floor, your substantial firms of family solicitors, deep in title, lease, covenant, and tenancy in every form or shape – men who set such store by their knowledge that they dole it out to you at so much per dozen words – words adulterated with obsolete expressions repeated ad nauseam; while upon the second-floor you would probably find firms of sharp practitioners, ready for business in any shape; and, as elsewhere through the house, the names of the occupants were painted upon the doors – black letters upon a parchment ground.

But the house in question was not entirely legal in its occupants, for if you had been ascending the stairs, before you had gone far, a loud sniff would have made you raise your head sharply towards the skylight, beneath which, sitting, or rather perched, upon the top balustrade, would have been visible the doughy, big, baby-like face of Mrs Sims, strongly resembling, with the white-muslin wings on either side, a fat-cheeked cherub, freshly settled after some ethereal flight.

Mrs Sims was the lady who did for those gentlemen of the house who wanted doing for, took in parcels, answered bells, and was also well-known in the neighbourhood as a convenient party in times of sickness, being willing to nurse a bachelor gentleman of the legal profession, or one of the poor fraternity of the rags around. She had stood at many a bedside had Mrs Sims, and seen the long sleep come to many a weary, broken-hearted suitor, and she had sniffed and sobbed at the recital of their miseries, offering the while such consolation as she could from the depths of a very simple but very honest heart.

After another loud sniff, and a curtsey performed invisibly, except that the cherubic head was seen to bob out of sight, and then apparently re-perch itself upon the balustrade, Mrs Sims would say “At home,” or “Not at home,” as the case might be. Then, as you left the staircase, the head would disappear, and, summer or winter, Mrs Sims might be heard refreshing herself with a blow at the fire by means of a very creaky, asthmatic pair of bellows.

Mrs Sims was busy, and had made visible the whole of her person, as standing at the door she pointed out into the square, calling the attention of one of her lodgers, as she termed them, to a passer-by.

“Here, you sir; fetch a cab – a four-wheeler,” shouted the lodger. “No; confound your bird – I don’t want birds, I want a cab.”

The person addressed was the inhabitant of Bennett’s-rents – the big, slouchy, large-jawed gentleman, in a fur cap and a sleeved-waistcoat, already known to the reader. He carried a small birdcage, tied in a cotton handkerchief, beneath his arm, while another spotted handkerchief wrapped his bull-neck, where it was pinned with a silver-mounted Stanhope lens, which was apparently regarded as a rare jewel. Upon being first called, he commenced expatiating upon the qualities of the bird, whose cage-envelope he began to unfasten, until so unceremoniously checked by the gentleman who summoned him.

“You’re a fine sort, you are,” growled the man as he went off in search of the cab; “and if I warn’t as dry as sorduss, I’d see you furder afore I’d fetch your gallus cab, so now, then. My name’s Jarker, chrissen William, that’s about what my name is, stand or fall by it – come, now.”

As nobody seemed disposed to “come, now,” Mr Jarker hastened his steps, and soon returned with the cab, placed his cage behind the hall-door, and then, under the direction of Mrs Sims, fetched down portmanteau and bags groaning and sighing beneath their weight, and raising up a smile of contempt upon his employer’s face as he watched the fellow’s actions, and scanned his powerful development and the idleness written so plainly upon his countenance. But soon the task was ended, the cab-door banged, Mrs Sims had turned on a little more of her laughing-gas to brighten her features by way of valediction to the departing lodger, and then, as she sniffed loudly, the cab drove off, leaving Mr Jarker spitting upon that curiosity, an honestly-earned sixpence in his hand.

“How’s the missus? why, she’s okkard, and I don’t s’pose you a-coming would do her any good, and she’s a-going to spend a shillin’ in ankerchers for someone as has a cold in her head, that’s what she’s a-goin’ to do,” said Mr Jarker, with a grin at Mrs Sims, and then he watched the affronted dame as she sniffed her way upstairs; but before she had reached the second flight, Mr Jarker had grinned again, drawing his lips back from his white teeth with a smile that more resembled a snarl.

Mr William Jarker, birdcatcher, fancier of pigeons, and of anything else which came to his net, stood listening to the sniffs and receding footsteps of Mrs Sims, placed the sixpence he had earned in the pocket of his tight corduroys, pulled off his large, flat, fur cap, and gave his head a scratch, thereby displaying a crop of hair which it would have been useless to attempt to brush or part, for it was decidedly short, and the barber who had last operated had not been careful, but left the said hair nicky and notchy in places. However, the style gave due prominence to the peculiar phrenological development of Mr Jarker’s bumps, while his ears stood out largely, and with an air that suggested cropping as an improvement to them as well, more especially since there was a great deal of the bull-dog in his appearance.

Mr Jarker replaced his cap, took his little birdcage from behind the door, and was just moving off, when a barrister came out of one of the lower rooms in full legal costume, muttering loudly, and evidently reciting a part of the performance he was about to go through.

Upon hearing the door open, Mr Jarker turned his head, and then gave an involuntary shudder as he moved off, while the counsel followed closely behind, wrapped in his brief, and at times talking loudly:

“Instead, m’lud, of the case being tried in this honourable court, m’lud, devoted as it is to civil causes, the defendant should be occupying the felon’s dock at the Old Bailey, m’lud; for a more shameful case of robbery – ”

“I’m gallussed!” muttered Mr Jarker, quickening his steps, and perspiring profusely, as he gave a furtive glance over his shoulder at the barrister, still rehearsing; “I’m gallussed! It didn’t oughter be allowed out in the public streets.”

Mr Jarker felt his nerves so disarranged in consequence of low diet, that after making his way out of the Inn, across Carey-street, and into the rags of the legal cloak, that is to say into Bennett’s-rents, he resolved to take advantage of there being a “public” at either end of the rents, and regardless of the whooping children who dashed by him, he went in and had “three-ha’porth” of the celebrated cream gin advertised outside upon a blue board with golden legend. After which enricher of his milk of human kindness, Mr Jarker wiped his mouth with the back of his hand as he passed through the swinging doors, hugged his cage against his ribs, muttered, “Didn’t oughter be allowed in the public streets,” and then forcing a way through a noisy tribe of children, he paused at Number 27 in the Rents – a dismal-looking old house, worse perhaps by broad daylight than in the early dawn, when some of its foulness had remained concealed. It had been a mansion once, in the days of the Jameses probably, when fresh air was a more abundant commodity in the City, and was not all used up long before it could penetrate so narrow a thoroughfare.

Mr Jarker slowly tramped up flight after flight of stairs till he came to the attic-floor, when, without removing his hands from his pockets, he kicked open the badly-hung door, and entered the bare room.

“O, you’re here agen, are yer?” he said sulkily to a dark, well-dressed woman, in black silk and fashionable bonnet, strangely out of place in the wretched room, whose other occupant was pale-faced, weary-looking Mrs Jarker, whose crimply white hands betokened a very late acquaintanceship with the washtub by the steamy window. “O, you’re here agen, are yer?” said Mr Jarker.

“Yes, Bill,” said Mrs Jarker timidly, every word she spoke seeming to flinch and dart out of reach of hearing almost before it was uttered. “Yes, Bill, she’s come again, and we’ve been talking it over – and – and – and – if you wouldn’t mind, Bill, I’d – ”

“How much?” growled Mr Jarker.

“Five shillings,” said his wife timidly; “five shillings a-week.”