Loaves and fishes

by Bernard Capes

The “Personal Reminiscences” of the late Mr. Justice Ganthony, now in process of being edited, are responsible for the following drollery:—

My first “chambers” were on the top, not to say the attic, floor of a house in (the now defunct) Furnival’s Inn. I called it “chambers,” in the plural, on the strength of a coal-cellar, in the window-seat, and a turn-up bedstead which became a cupboard by day. That accounted for two rooms, and “the usual offices,” as the house-agents say, when they refer to a kitchen six feet by eight in the basement. Trousers, after all, are only one garment, although they are called a pair.

There I sat among the cobwebs, like a spider, and waited for my first brief. In the meanwhile, I lived as the spiders do—on hope, flavoured with a little attic salt. It was not a cheering repast; but, such as it was, there was no end to it. By and by I was almost convinced (of what I had been friendlily advised) that it was a forlorn hope—the sort that leads to glory and the grave; probably by starvation. A spider has always, as a last resource, his web to roll up and devour. I ate up my chambers by degrees; that is to say, I dined, figuratively, day in day out, at the sign of the Three Balls. But this was to consume my own hump, like the camel. When that should be all gone, what next? There is a vulgar expression for prog, which is “belly-timber.” I only realized its applicability to my own case when my chairs and tables, and other furniture, had gone the primrose way of digestion. It was the brass fender, a “genuine antique,” that sat heaviest on my chest.

Furnival’s Inn was not a cheerful place to starve in. There was an atmosphere of gloom and decay about it, which derived, no doubt, from its former dealings in Chancery. In the days of its prosperity it had fed the Inns of Court, as Winchester feeds New College; in my time it could not feed itself. The rats were at it, and the bugs, which are the only things I know of that can thrive on crumbling plaster. I had the distinction of providing some of their rare debauches to the latter; but that was before I began to crumble myself. Some of my blood was certainly incorporated in the ancient walls, and was included in their downfall.

My view, from Furnival’s Inn, was dismally introspective. It commanded, in the first place, a quadrangle of emptiness; and included, in the second, an array of lowering and mouldy tenements like my own, at whose stark windows hungry expectant faces would glimmer fitfully, and scan the yard for the clients who never came, and disappear.

There was a decrepit inn, of another and the social type, budded, like a vicious intestinal growth, within Furnival’s. I used to speculate, as I looked down at night on its tottering portico, and solemn old frequenters, and the lights blinking behind its blinds like corpse-candles, if it were not a half-way house of call for the dead. For, by day, all business seemed withdrawn from it, and its upper rooms might have been mortuaries for any life they exhibited. No cheery housemaid ever looked from their windows to chaff the amorous Boots below. There was none to chaff. The dead need no boots.

Furnival’s Inn had one gullet, by which the roar of the world came in from Holborn. Little else came in but tradesmen, and bailiffs, and an occasional policeman in a thoughtful archæological mood. But the gullet was a vent as much of exit as of entrance; and by it one could escape from the madness of ghostly isolation, and mingle with the world, and look in the pastry-cooks’ windows. Whenever I was moved to one of these chameleonic foraging expeditions, I would pin a ticket on my door: “Called away. Please leave message with housekeeper,” and light my pipe with it when I returned. I wonder if any one ever read the fatuous legends? To Hope’s eyes, I am sure, they must have been dinted, like phonographic records, with the echoes of all the footsteps that ever sounded on the stairs during my absences.

Those footsteps! How they marked the measure of my desperation! They were not many, and they were far between; but not one in all the dreary tale ever reached my attic. Why should they, indeed? I am free to acknowledge its moral inaccessibility. Jurisprudence does not, in its convincing phases, inhabit immediately under the roof. The higher one lives, in practice, the lower one’s practice is like to be. The law is not an elevating pursuit.

I recognized this in the end; and the moment I recognized it I got my first client.

One November evening, very depressed at last, I was sitting smoking, and ruminating over my doleful fate, and thinking if I had not better shut myself up for good and all in the bed-cupboard, when I heard steps enter the hall below. My ears pricked, of course, from force of habit, and from force of habit I uttered a scornful stage laugh—for the withering of Fortune, if she happened to be by. But, in spite of my scorn, the steps, ignoring the architects’ offices on the ground floor (Frost and Driffel, contractors for Castles in Spain), ascended and continued to ascend—past the deed-engrosser’s closet on the half-way landing; past the empty chambers immediately below mine (whence, on gusty nights, the tiny creaking of the rope, by which the last tenant had hanged himself from a beam, would speak through the floor under my bed), and higher yet, right up to my door.