use his master-key and look into the chambers, and give them the
benefit of a whiff of air. Then, it was found that he had hanged
himself to his bedstead, and had left this written memorandum: 'I
should prefer to be cut down by my neighbour and friend (if he will
allow me to call him so), H. Parkle, Esq.' This was an end of
Parkle's occupancy of chambers. He went into lodgings immediately.
Third. While Parkle lived in Gray's Inn, and I myself was
uncommercially preparing for the Bar - which is done, as everybody
knows, by having a frayed old gown put on in a pantry by an old
woman in a chronic state of Saint Anthony's fire and dropsy, and,
so decorated, bolting a bad dinner in a party of four, whereof each
individual mistrusts the other three - I say, while these things
were, there was a certain elderly gentleman who lived in a court of
the Temple, and was a great judge and lover of port wine. Every
day he dined at his club and drank his bottle or two of port wine,
and every night came home to the Temple and went to bed in his
lonely chambers. This had gone on many years without variation,
when one night he had a fit on coming home, and fell and cut his
head deep, but partly recovered and groped about in the dark to
find the door. When he was afterwards discovered, dead, it was
clearly established by the marks of his hands about the room that
he must have done so. Now, this chanced on the night of Christmas
Eve, and over him lived a young fellow who had sisters and young
country friends, and who gave them a little party that night, in
the course of which they played at Blindman's Buff. They played
that game, for their greater sport, by the light of the fire only;
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and once, when they were all quietly rustling and stealing about,
and the blindman was trying to pick out the prettiest sister (for
which I am far from blaming him), somebody cried, Hark! The man
below must be playing Blindman's Buff by himself to-night! They
listened, and they heard sounds of some one falling about and
stumbling against furniture, and they all laughed at the conceit,
and went on with their play, more light-hearted and merry than
ever. Thus, those two so different games of life and death were
played out together, blindfolded, in the two sets of chambers.
Such are the occurrences, which, coming to my knowledge, imbued me
long ago with a strong sense of the loneliness of chambers. There
was a fantastic illustration to much the same purpose implicitly
believed by a strange sort of man now dead, whom I knew when I had
not quite arrived at legal years of discretion, though I was
already in the uncommercial line.
This was a man who, though not more than thirty, had seen the world
in divers irreconcilable capacities - had been an officer in a
South American regiment among other odd things - but had not
achieved much in any way of life, and was in debt, and in hiding.
He occupied chambers of the dreariest nature in Lyons Inn; his
name, however, was not up on the door, or door-post, but in lieu of
it stood the name of a friend who had died in the chambers, and had
given him the furniture. The story arose out of the furniture, and
was to this effect:- Let the former holder of the chambers, whose
name was still upon the door and door-post, be Mr. Testator.
Mr. Testator took a set of chambers in Lyons Inn when he had but
very scanty furniture for his bedroom, and none for his sittingroom.
He had lived some wintry months in this condition, and had
found it very bare and cold. One night, past midnight, when he sat
writing and still had writing to do that must be done before he
went to bed, he found himself out of coals. He had coals downstairs,
but had never been to his cellar; however the cellar-key
was on his mantelshelf, and if he went down and opened the cellar
it fitted, he might fairly assume the coals in that cellar to be
his. As to his laundress, she lived among the coal-waggons and
Thames watermen - for there were Thames watermen at that time - in
some unknown rat-hole by the river, down lanes and alleys on the
other side of the Strand. As to any other person to meet him or
betting, brooding over bill-discounting or renewing - asleep or
awake, minding its own affairs. Mr. Testator took his coal-scuttle
in one hand, his candle and key in the other, and descended to the
dismallest underground dens of Lyons Inn, where the late vehicles
in the streets became thunderous, and all the water-pipes in the
neighbourhood seemed to have Macbeth's Amen sticking in their
throats, and to be trying to get it out. After groping here and
there among low doors to no purpose, Mr. Testator at length came to
a door with a rusty padlock which his key fitted. Getting the door
open with much trouble, and looking in, he found, no coals, but a
confused pile of furniture. Alarmed by this intrusion on another
man's property, he locked the door again, found his own cellar,
filled his scuttle, and returned up-stairs.
But the furniture he had seen, ran on castors across and across Mr.
Testator's mind incessantly, when, in the chill hour of five in the
morning, he got to bed. He particularly wanted a table to write
at, and a table expressly made to be written at, had been the piece
of furniture in the foreground of the heap. When his laundress
emerged from her burrow in the morning to make his kettle boil, he
artfully led up to the subject of cellars and furniture; but the
two ideas had evidently no connexion in her mind. When she left
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him, and he sat at his breakfast, thinking about the furniture, he
recalled the rusty state of the padlock, and inferred that the
furniture must have been stored in the cellars for a long time -
was perhaps forgotten - owner dead, perhaps? After thinking it
over, a few days, in the course of which he could pump nothing out
of Lyons Inn about the furniture, he became desperate, and resolved
to borrow that table. He did so, that night. He had not had the
table long, when he determined to borrow an easy-chair; he had not
had that long, when he made up his mind to borrow a bookcase; then,
a couch; then, a carpet and rug. By that time, he felt he was 'in
furniture stepped in so far,' as that it could be no worse to
borrow it all. Consequently, he borrowed it all, and locked up the
cellar for good. He had always locked it, after every visit. He
had carried up every separate article in the dead of the night,
and, at the best, had felt as wicked as a Resurrection Man. Every
article was blue and furry when brought into his rooms, and he had
had, in a murderous and guilty sort of way, to polish it up while
London slept.
Mr. Testator lived in his furnished chambers two or three years, or
more, and gradually lulled himself into the opinion that the
furniture was his own. This was his convenient state of mind when,
late one night, a step came up the stairs, and a hand passed over
his door feeling for his knocker, and then one deep and solemn rap
was rapped that might have been a spring in Mr. Testator's easychair
to shoot him out of it; so promptly was it attended with that
effect.
With a candle in his hand, Mr. Testator went to the door, and found
there, a very pale and very tall man; a man who stooped; a man with
very high shoulders, a very narrow chest, and a very red nose; a
shabby-genteel man. He was wrapped in a long thread-bare black
coat, fastened up the front with more pins than buttons, and under
his arm he squeezed an umbrella without a handle, as if he were
playing bagpipes. He said, 'I ask your pardon, but can you tell me
- ' and stopped; his eyes resting on some object within the
chambers.
'Can I tell you what?' asked Mr. Testator, noting his stoppage with
quick alarm.
'I ask your pardon,' said the stranger, 'but - this is not the
inquiry I was going to make - DO I see in there, any small article
of property belonging to ME?'
Mr. Testator was beginning to stammer that he was not aware - when
the visitor slipped past him, into the chambers. There, in a
goblin way which froze Mr. Testator to the marrow, he examined,
first, the writing-table, and said, 'Mine;' then, the easy-chair,
and said, 'Mine;' then, the bookcase, and said, 'Mine;' then,
turned up a corner of the carpet, and said, 'Mine!' in a word,
inspected every item of furniture from the cellar, in succession,
and said, 'Mine!' Towards the end of this investigation, Mr.
Testator perceived that he was sodden with liquor, and that the
liquor was gin. He was not unsteady with gin, either in his speech
or carriage; but he was stiff with gin in both particulars.
Mr. Testator was in a dreadful state, for (according to his making
out of the story) the possible consequences of what he had done in
recklessness and hardihood, flashed upon him in their fulness for
the first time. When they had stood gazing at one another for a
little while, he tremulously began:
'Sir, I am conscious that the fullest explanation, compensation,
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and restitution, are your due. They shall be yours. Allow me to
entreat that, without temper, without even natural irritation on
your part, we may have a little - '
'Drop of something to drink,' interposed the stranger. 'I am
agreeable.'
Mr. Testator had intended to say, 'a little quiet conversation,'
but with great relief of mind adopted the amendment. He produced a
decanter of gin, and was bustling about for hot water and sugar,
when he found that his visitor had already drunk half of the
decanter's contents. With hot water and sugar the visitor drank
the remainder before he had been an hour in the chambers by the
chimes of the church of St. Mary in the Strand; and during the
process he frequently whispered to himself, 'Mine!'
The gin gone, and Mr. Testator wondering what was to follow it, the
visitor rose and said, with increased stiffness, 'At what hour of
the morning, sir, will it be convenient?' Mr. Testator hazarded,
'At ten?' 'Sir,' said the visitor, 'at ten, to the moment, I shall
be here.' He then contemplated Mr. Testator somewhat at leisure,
and said, 'God bless you! How is your wife?' Mr. Testator (who
never had a wife) replied with much feeling, 'Deeply anxious, poor
soul, but otherwise well.' The visitor thereupon turned and went
away, and fell twice in going down-stairs. From that hour he was
never heard of. Whether he was a ghost, or a spectral illusion of
conscience, or a drunken man who had no business there, or the
drunken rightful owner of the furniture, with a transitory gleam of
memory; whether he got safe home, or had no time to get to; whether
he died of liquor on the way, or lived in liquor ever afterwards;
he never was heard of more. This was the story, received with the
furniture and held to be as substantial, by its second possessor in
an upper set of chambers in grim Lyons Inn.
It is to be remarked of chambers in general, that they must have
been built for chambers, to have the right kind of loneliness. You
may make a great dwelling-house very lonely, but isolating suites
of rooms and calling them chambers, but you cannot make the true
kind of loneliness. In dwelling-houses, there have been family
festivals; children have grown in them, girls have bloomed into
women in them, courtships and marriages have taken place in them.
True chambers never were young, childish, maidenly; never had dolls
in them, or rocking-horses, or christenings, or betrothals, or
little coffins. Let Gray's Inn identify the child who first
touched hands and hearts with Robinson Crusoe, in any one of its
many 'sets,' and that child's little statue, in white marble with a
golden inscription, shall be at its service, at my cost and charge,
as a drinking fountain for the spirit, to freshen its thirsty
square. Let Lincoln's produce from all its houses, a twentieth of
the procession derivable from any dwelling-house one-twentieth of
its age, of fair young brides who married for love and hope, not
settlements, and all the Vice-Chancellors shall thenceforward be
kept in nosegays for nothing, on application to the writer hereof.
It is not denied that on the terrace of the Adelphi, or in any of
the streets of that subterranean-stable-haunted spot, or about
Bedford-row, or James-street of that ilk (a grewsome place), or
anywhere among the neighbourhoods that have done flowering and have
run to seed, you may find Chambers replete with the accommodations
of Solitude, Closeness, and Darkness, where you may be as lowspirited
as in the genuine article, and might be as easily
murdered, with the placid reputation of having merely gone down to
the sea-side. But, the many waters of life did run musical in
those dry channels once; - among the Inns, never. The only popular
legend known in relation to any one of the dull family of Inns, is
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a dark Old Bailey whisper concerning Clement's, and importing how
the black creature who holds the sun-dial there, was a negro who
slew his master and built the dismal pile out of the contents of
his strong box - for which architectural offence alone he ought to
have been condemned to live in it. But, what populace would waste
fancy upon such a place, or on New Inn, Staple Inn, Barnard's Inn,
or any of the shabby crew?
The genuine laundress, too, is an institution not to be had in its
entirety out of and away from the genuine Chambers. Again, it is
not denied that you may be robbed elsewhere. Elsewhere you may
have - for money - dishonesty, drunkenness, dirt, laziness, and
profound incapacity. But the veritable shining-red-faced shameless
laundress; the t
rue Mrs. Sweeney - in figure, colour, texture, and
smell, like the old damp family umbrella; the tip-top complicated
abomination of stockings, spirits, bonnet, limpness, looseness, and
larceny; is only to be drawn at the fountain-head. Mrs. Sweeney is
beyond the reach of individual art. It requires the united efforts
of several men to ensure that great result, and it is only
developed in perfection under an Honourable Society and in an Inn
of Court.
CHAPTER XV - NURSE'S STORIES
There are not many places that I find it more agreeable to revisit
when I am in an idle mood, than some places to which I have never
been. For, my acquaintance with those spots is of such long
standing, and has ripened into an intimacy of so affectionate a
nature, that I take a particular interest in assuring myself that
they are unchanged.
I never was in Robinson Crusoe's Island, yet I frequently return
there. The colony he established on it soon faded away, and it is
uninhabited by any descendants of the grave and courteous
Spaniards, or of Will Atkins and the other mutineers, and has
relapsed into its original condition. Not a twig of its wicker
houses remains, its goats have long run wild again, its screaming
parrots would darken the sun with a cloud of many flaming colours
if a gun were fired there, no face is ever reflected in the waters
of the little creek which Friday swam across when pursued by his
two brother cannibals with sharpened stomachs. After comparing
notes with other travellers who have similarly revisited the Island
and conscientiously inspected it, I have satisfied myself that it
contains no vestige of Mr. Atkins's domesticity or theology, though
his track on the memorable evening of his landing to set his
captain ashore, when he was decoyed about and round about until it
was dark, and his boat was stove, and his strength and spirits
failed him, is yet plainly to be traced. So is the hill-top on
which Robinson was struck dumb with joy when the reinstated captain
pointed to the ship, riding within half a mile of the shore, that
was to bear him away, in the nine-and-twentieth year of his
seclusion in that lonely place. So is the sandy beach on which the
memorable footstep was impressed, and where the savages hauled up
their canoes when they came ashore for those dreadful public