1 If you, being a stranger to this London of ours, inquire after Temple Bar, your inquiry will be fruitless.
Temple Bar was removed about forty years since; but if you traverse the Strand, and, leaving the jostle of the Strand behind you, venture on--past Mr. Gladstone's statue and the two churches which part the streaming traffic as rocks part the waters of a river--you will become suddenly aware of two pointed wings and a grotesque dragon-shaped head showing black between high buildings against a narrow slip of sky.
This is the "Griffin." He stands where Temple Bar stood. Above him tower the clock and gray pinnacles of the law courts. Westward, he looks toward the seethe of near Aldwych, and far Trafalgar Square. Behind him clang the news-presses of Fleet Street. At his right wing and his left you will find the advocates of our law; "barristers," as we call them.
They are not quite of the every-day world, these barristers. Their minds, even their bodies, seem to move more precisely. The past influences them rather than the present. Sentimentality influences them hardly at all. At home--even now very few of them live at the wings of the Griffin--these men may be lovers, husbands, friends. Here they are advocates of a code, a selected body, inheritors of a six-hundred-year-old tradition. Very pleasant fellows on the whole: not at all inhuman; only--as befits their calling--a little aloof.
It may perhaps help our stranger to understand this aloofness if, turning southward from the Griffin down the clefts of Inner or Middle Temple Lane, he will explore some of the "courts" where these barristers of ours have their "chambers"--Hare Court, Pump Court, Fountain Court, Miter Court, and the rest.
Here, not a newsboy's shout from Fleet Street, our exploring stranger will find a veritable sanctum of time-defying quiet--red-brick and gray-stone houses, paved or graveled walks, fountains, courtyards, trees, gardens, cloisters, colonnades, and quadrangles; the whole set, as though it were a symbol of tradition controlling progress, midway between the moneyed "City" and the governing "West End."
But the quiet of the Temple--Gray's Inn and Clifford's Inn lie north of the Griffin and beyond our story--is an illusive quiet; the quiet of good manners concealing busyness. If you watch the faces of the men who walk those graveled courtyards, you will see them as obsessed by thought as the faces of any merchant in the moneyed City. If you climb the uncarpeted stairs of those Georgian houses, and read the names painted in block letters on the doors, you will find many whom the clanging presses of Fleet Street have made familiar--and many, many more to whom even the fame of Fleet Street has never come.
So far, Ronald Cavendish, who shared his chambers in Pump Court with three other barristers and Benjamin Bunce, their communal clerk--a little melancholy individual with a face like parchment, the clothes of a waiter off duty, and watery blue eyes which perpetually craved recognition--belonged to the latter category. "But the Ellerson case," thought Benjamin, "might easily bring 'us' into prominence."
It meant a good deal that "we," who had lost five years at the bar through "our" going to the war, should be briefed by Wilberforce, Wilberforce & Cartwright, that very solid firm of Society solicitors, as junior to the great Brunton. "We," backed by our friendship with young Mr. Wilberforce, "our" mother's name, and an undoubted grip of common law problems, were certainly going to get on--an excellent circumstance for Bunce.
"Ellerson v. Ellerson to-day, sir. King's Bench Seven. Mr. Justice Mallory's court. I have put the papers on your desk." The little man spoke as though "we" were so busy as to need reminding; and withdrew into the anteroom.
Ronald Cavendish threw an amused "Thanks, Bunce," after the retreating figure; and applied himself to study. Ellerson (Lady Hermione) v. Ellerson (Lord Arthur) presented features of intense legal interest. Could a wife, actually but not yet judicially separated from her husband, sue him for libel? If successful, could she obtain damages? There were precedents, of course--Hill v. Hill and another, Rowland v. Rowland. To say nothing of the celebrated Clitheroe decision!
Long ago the junior, acting on Brunton's instructions, had looked up those precedents. Now another possible one crossed his mind. He rose from the ink-stained table; searched among the bookshelves; found a volume; and stood thumbing it. The precedent was useless: Brunton, as usual, had drawn the covert like a pack of beagles--leaving not even a rabbit unscented.
Brunton! Thinking of his "leader," professional instincts blurted in the barrister's brain. The low, dingy, paneled room, the shaft of sunlight on the worn carpet, the green of trees at his window, seemed to vanish from view. He was on horseback again--fox-hunting--with Brunton's wife.
"March," he thought. "And now it's May. Why can't I forget?"
But he couldn't forget. The woman's face, flawless, almost colorless, the vivid wallflower-brown of her eyes and hair, had haunted him for nearly three months. He was "in love" with her. At least, he supposed he must be "in love."
He had been "in love" before; with a girl in Hampshire (long ago, that--he could scarcely remember her name--Prudence); with the usual undesirable; with his cousin, Lucy Edwards, when he went to the front. Remembering such milk-and-water affairs, it seemed impossible that this new emotion could be love.
Was it perhaps passion! He began, standing there in the sunlight, to consider passion--as dispassionately as Aliette herself might have tried to consider it. (In deliberation of thought, they resembled each other, these two.) Although by no means an ascetic, he hated the abstract idea of passion, finding it rather indecent--like the letters not meant for public eyes which, defying the vigilance of solicitors, occasionally found their way into that stereotyped farce, the divorce court.
And yet this emotion could hardly be other than passion.
The blue eyes under the broad brow grew very serious. Inwardly Ronald Cavendish, despite his outward poise--the result of training--had remained extraordinarily young. "Passion," he thought; "how beastly." And for another man's wife! That made it impossible. That was why the emotion must be fought.
He had been fighting it ever since they parted. But the emotion would not be conquered. At times it became an ache, a sheer physical ache.
At such times--and one of them, he knew, was on him now--Ronnie conceived an amazing distrust of his own self-control; an amazing gladness that they had not met in London: although he had seen her, at a distance, more than once, walking across Hyde Park, a Great Dane dog at her heels. They looked, to his imagination, the tiniest mite forlorn--a little lonely woman (he always thought of her as little) with a big lonely hound. Invariably, the sight of her dispelled mere passion, melting it to a strange tenderness, akin to the tenderness he felt toward his mother.
"Mr. James Wilberforce on the telephone, sir," announced Benjamin Bunce; and shattered introspection. Ronnie went outside to the communal telephone.
"Hello, Ronnie." The solicitor's voice sounded irascible over the wire.
"Hello, Jimmy; what's the trouble?"
"The Ellerson case. Lady H. has got the wind up. She's with the pater now; wants to go and sit in court till the case comes on; wants a conference with Brunton; wants anything and everything. Of course we can't get hold of H. B. Can we bring her over to you?"
"Bring her along, by all means," said the barrister.
2
The offices of Wilberforce, Wilberforce & Cartwright, which occupy three floors of a modern red-brick building at the foot of Norfolk Street, fifty yards from the Thames Embankment and the Temple station of the Underground, are rabbit-warrened by white-wood partitions and frosted glass doors into a maze of conflicting passages.
On the top floor are the bookkeeping rooms, whence issue--still in stately clerical handwritings--those red-taped folioed bills ("To long and special interview when we informed you that we had taken counsel's opinion and he was of the opinion that . . .") which are never disputed though often delayed in payment by an aristocratic clientèle.
Below these, the Cartwrights--an old-fashioned firm of City solicitors and commissioners for oaths, with a practice one third commercial (Mr. Jacob Cartwright), one third admiralty (Mr. Hezekiah Cartwright), and one third criminal (Mr. John Cartwright), who amalgamated with the Wilberforces in 1918--hold undisputed sway.
On the ground floor, guarded by a bemedaled commissionaire, sit Sir Peter Wilberforce and his son, surrounded by their secretaries, their telephone-exchange, their notice-boards, and their waiting-rooms.
Jimmy Wilberforce finished his conversation on the private telephone; left the box; gave a casual glance at two obviously seafaring gentlemen who were importuning Sergeant Murphy to "hurry up Mr. Hezekiah"; and went back to his father's office--a scrupulously tidy apartment, black gold-lettered deed-boxes lining one of its walls, the rest pictureless and painted palest écru in contrast with the mahogany furniture and the tobacco-brown carpet on which Lady Hermione Ellerson's ermine muff now sprawled like a huge white cat.
Jimmy's father--a white-haired, white-mustached old gentleman, gold-eye-glassed, black-coated, a little bald of forehead but still ruddy of cheek--sat in his favorite attitude, one fine hand on the chair-arm, the other grasping an ivory paper-knife, at the leather-topped desk by the big bright window. By his side drooped his client.
"Well?" queried Sir Peter Wilberforce.
Jimmy turned to Lady Hermione. "I am afraid I can't get hold of Brunton for you. But Cavendish can see us if we go over at once."
"Oh, that is kind of Mr. Cavendish!" purred Lady Hermione.
3
"Lady Hermione Ellerson, Sir Peter Wilberforce, Mr. James Wilberforce," announced Benjamin Bunce.
Ronald, rising to receive his client, was met with an outstretched hand and a torrent of words.
"Oh, Mr. Cavendish, you will help us, won't you? It's like this, you see. Last night while I was playing bridge at the club, Mr. Vereker--he's a barrister, you know--told me that I ought to settle. Of course, as Sir Peter says, he is in a kind of way a friend of my husband's----"
The tall willowy creature--she had dark hair, dark eyes, long nervous hands, and a long pearl necklace which bobbed nervously on her flat young bosom--rattled away till Wilberforce senior stopped her. Then she drooped to the offered chair, and sat interjecting staccato comments while the three men did their best to reassure her.
"And still I think I'd rather settle," she ejaculated, after half an hour's conference.
"My dear Lady Ellerson"--old Peter Wilberforce employed his softest purr--"of course I'll settle if you want me to. But I do ask you to consider the effect on your reputation. And besides, we have an excellent case. A really excellent case. Your husband's own admission, in the interrogatories, that he had discussed the question of divorcing you with other people besides his father. The fact that he never did institute proceedings for a divorce, that he never had the slightest grounds for instituting such proceedings----"
"Still, Mr. Vereker said----"
"Can't we forget Mr. Vereker? Mr. Cavendish has assured you that legally----"
"Oh, I hate the law!" burst out Lady Hermione. "I wish that Arthur----" She began to cry, in a ladylike lace-handkerchief way that made her extraordinarily alluring; and Ronnie, who had only been giving his sober opinion on the professional subtleties involved, without considering the human aspect, felt suddenly sorry for her. Women, in matrimonial cases, nearly always got the worst of it.
Besides, he knew the Ellersons socially, knew a little of their history--war-marriage, quarrels about money, separation, and now this curious case in which she was suing her husband for libel and slander. It seemed a pity that they did not arrange a divorce and have done with it.
The telephone rang. Benjamin Bunce came in to say that Sir Peter's office wanted him, that Mr. Justice Mallory was already summing up the preceding case, and that Ellerson v. Ellerson would come on immediately after the adjournment. The conference broke up.
4
"I'm afraid she won't fight it out," pronounced Wilberforce, snatching a hasty meal, at Ronnie's invitation, in the somber paneled splendor of Inner Temple Hall.
All up and down the long monastic tables, under the stained-glass windows and dignified pictures, other barristers and their guests were lunching, their low talk hardly reaching their neighbors' ears.
"Unless Brunton makes her," went on the solicitor.
They discussed their client with some frankness for another ten minutes, consulted watches, and moved themselves to a second monastic apartment for coffee and cigarettes.
"Talking of H. B.," said Wilberforce, "reminds me that I had a letter from his wife's sister the other day. She's staying with the Bruntons at Lancaster Gate, and wants me to call on her."
"Really?"
"You'd better come too. There's nothing like a bit of social work for getting briefs. Besides, little Mrs. Brunton's charming. We'll go next Sunday afternoon."
"Sorry, I'm going to play golf." Ronnie spoke calmly, his serious face giving no hint of the emotions which his friend's suggestion had set stirring. "What made Miss Fullerford write to you?"
"Oh, we've been corresponding for some time. I promised to help her about--a legal matter." Wilberforce nearly blushed. "She's a nice girl, isn't she?
"I'm getting on for forty, you know," he went on, getting no reply. "And they'll make the pater a baronet one of these days. About time I got married, don't you think, old man!" Then he consulted his watch again; and hurried off to Norfolk Street.
Ronnie, having paid for their coffee, sauntered out through the colonnades to his chambers, and back through Inner Temple Lane toward the law courts. Sauntering, brief under arm, he thought of his friend.
So Jimmy intended proposing to Mollie Fullerford. She would accept him, of course. Jimmy was a splendid match. Reticent devil--he hadn't even mentioned the girl since their return from Key Hatch. Jimmy would be Aliette's brother-in-law. Aliette! He had no right to think of her as "Aliette." Jimmy to marry Aliette's sister--that would mean the end of their friendship. How women complicated one's life! Why should he end his friendship with Jimmy, his best pal, just because . . .
"Because of what?" asked the schoolmaster Cavendish in Ronnie's mind.
"Because you're in love with his future sister-in-law," answered the imaginative Wixton.
5
Passing up the broad steps into the law courts, Ronnie was aware of unusual commotion. Society, mainly represented by the "Ritz crowd," had decided to patronize the Ellerson case. Lady Cynthia Barberus and her friend Miss Elizabeth Cattistock were posing to massed batteries of press cameras. An aristocratic poetess with bobbed hair had draped herself by the railings. Two actresses, so fashionable that they only needed to act when off the stage, drove up with Lord Letchingbury, the latest patron of the unpaying drama, in a Rolls-Royce limousine, causing mild excitement among a crowd of collected loafers. The constable, saluting Ronnie, positively beamed approval.
Ronnie, returning the salute a trifle grimly (like many of his kind, the publicity side of the law always irritated him), entered the archway and turned left-handed into the robing-rooms.
Here all was quiet again. Hugh Spillcroft, a rising young specialist in commercial cases, spoke to him as he arranged the white bands round his collar, tucked in the tapes and drew on his black "stuff" robe before adjusting the light gray, horsehair wig.
"Going to win?"
"Settled out of court, I should say."
"Not if H. B. can help it," snapped Henry Smith-Assher, am enormous Pickwickian fellow with a bull-neck and a bull-face. "That chap never misses a chance of self-advertisement."
Two or three other men chimed in. Brunton, it appeared, was paying the usual penalty of the successful--unpopularity. Ronnie put on his wig, and passed out, a dignified legal figure, into the great hall of the courts.
This place, so vast and bare that the largest cloud of witnesses would leave it uncrowded, so high and dim that even at noon its vaulted roof seems lost in a brown haze, exercised a peculiar fascination over Julia Cavendish's only son. The Wixton in him saw it as the gigantic anteroom of traditional justice, a symbol whose hugeness hushed even scoffers to an awed silence.
For he loved his profession, this diffident, difficult young man; and, loving it, held its code, despite all the imperfections he was first to acknowledge, very high.
But this afternoon, somehow or other, the inhumanity of the place depressed him. Outside, there was sunshine, traffic, life, even love; here, only gloom and rules. As he strode diagonally across the flagstones up the tortuous staircase to "king's bench division," he met Thurston, the divorce specialist.
"Hello, Cavendish," greeted Thurston; "you've got the spicy case to-day."
Lady Hermione was standing by the embrasure of the corridor-window, talking to Sir Peter. Already a little crowd had foregathered round the glass-paneled oak doors of the court-room. She smiled at Ronnie over their heads. He smiled back at her reassuringly; caught Sir Peter's conference-forbidding eye; and pushed his way through the swing-doors and the red curtain into court.
The square, high apartment, paneled in dark oak as a church--judge's da?s, jury-box, clerk's table, and pulpit-like witness-box dominating its raked pews (above which the spectators' and judge's galleries already rustled anticipatory silks and feathers),--was still half-empty. Ronnie insinuated his long body into the junior's pew, which is behind that reserved for king's counsel, and began turning over his brief. Turning it, he could not help thinking of his "leader"--of Brunton--Brunton whose "war service" had not cost him five years' loss of briefs--Brunton, who had fame, and fat fees, and a house in Lancaster Gate . . . and Aliette for wife. The court began to fill. Twelve "special" jurymen, equally fed up with a bad lunch and the disappointment at not having been dismissed after the last case, clattered into their box. The clerk and the reporters took their places. Barristers, some with applications to present before the opening of Ellerson v. Ellerson, some mere spectators, pushed their way along the front pews. In the back pews crowded various witnesses, solicitors' clerks, and a favored few among the public who had bluffed or bribed their way in.
Lord Arthur arrived with his solicitor. They stood talking for some moments, and finally sat down. Ronnie, looking up from his brief, could see their two heads, still conferring, below him to his left. The opposing K.C., Sir Martin Duckworth, a smooth-faced, smooth-voiced politician, arrived in a very new silk gown, and asked audibly of his junior if he'd seen the plaintiff. The plaintiff and Sir Peter sidled to their places in front of the clerk's table, turning courteous backs on the defendant. Last of all, five seconds before the opening, Brunton rushed in.
Aliette's husband, looking dignified enough in full legal trappings, nodded at Ronnie; and leaned over to greet his client just as the bewigged clerk announced "Silence"; and Mr. Justice Mallory, a benevolent-looking old image--scarlet baldrick across his wide-sleeved gown, winking spectacles across his creased forehead--appeared through the curtain at the back of his da?s; was risen to by the court; and took his seat.
Various barristers rose up; presented various applications; and sat down again to hear "Ellerson v. Ellerson" or withdrew--according to the degree of busyness they had attained.
For Ellerson v. Ellerson, as "opened" a moment later by Hector Brunton, was more than a cause célèbre: it might, if fought to a decision, go down to legal history as a "test" case, a precedent established for all time. Wherefore the barristers--such as could--stayed.
But the twelve men in the jury-box were not barristers. "His lordship," Brunton told them, "will direct you on the legal questions involved. All I ask you to consider is this. If I prove, as I shall prove to you by the mouths of competent witnesses, that this unhappy, this innocent lady, my client, has been slandered, and vilely slandered--for, mark my words, there is no slander so vile as a slander on a woman's virtue--by the man at whose hands she has the right most to expect protection--by her husband: if I prove to you that, through this slander, she has suffered damage, intellectual damage, social damage, damage to her health and to her reputation: then, gentlemen, I hope you will demonstrate by your verdict that, in England at any rate, a wife is not her husband's property, his chattel to do with as he will, but a free citizeness, as much entitled to be protected from the slanders of her husband as from those of any other man or woman in this country."
Brunton boomed on--his appeal all to sentiment. The judge drowsed. Ronnie, nonchalant behind his leader, could not help envying the even flow of his oratory. "If only I could speak like that," thought Ronnie vaguely.
But suddenly, as the K.C. neared his peroration, Ronnie's nonchalance vanished. "Marriage," boomed Brunton, "is not slavery. A man, just because he happens to marry a woman, does not own her."
"But he does," thought the junior; "in law he does own her. In law this man owns Aliette."
And suddenly the broad black-silked back, the bulging neck under the horsehair curls, the loud confident voice, and every gesture of the gentlemanly hands grew hateful. He, Ronald Cavendish, the man and not the lawyer in him, resented all these; and resented them all the more furiously because he hated himself for the resentment.
At last Brunton sat down.
"Opened high enough, didn't he?" whispered Jimmy Wilberforce, who had insinuated himself to the side of Ronnie's pew. "Wonder what he'll make of her in the witness-box."
But now, before Brunton could call his witnesses, Sir Martin Duckworth rose to address his lordship.
No case, submitted Sir Martin, had been made out for the jury. A husband--in law--could not slander his wife; nor a wife her husband. In law they were both one. Therefore, even if his learned friend succeeded in obtaining a verdict, he could not succeed on the question of damages. That had been laid down in . . . The politician produced authorities, calf-bound volumes book-marked with strips of paper. He began quoting them in his singsong sleepy voice. Lady Cynthia yawned audibly.
Brunton turned to Cavendish, as a sportsman to his loader; and, as a well-trained loader, Cavendish supplied the legal weapons--books. The flash of hatred against Brunton was forgotten in his eagerness to win.
The judge began arguing with the politician. "He, the judge, understood that the parties in this case were not actually living together. Did not that, in Sir Martin's opinion, make any difference?" In Sir Martin's opinion, it did not. Brunton chipped in. The lawyers in court stiffened to interest. Miss Elizabeth Cattistock blew an irritated nose.
The wrangle between bench and bar persisted: only Ronnie, who took no part in it, saw Lady Hermione's black hat turn slowly from right to left. It seemed to Ronnie's imagination that the invisible eyes under the hat-brim were making some call to Lord Arthur. Then he saw Lord Arthur's head turn, almost imperceptibly, from left to right; saw Lord Arthur's eyes light with understanding, soften to that invisible appeal. "She'll never go into the box," thought Ronnie. "She'll go back to her husband." And despite his eagerness to win, he felt glad--glad that humanity should triumph over the law.
But Brunton was not bothering about the humanities, Brunton protested that Sir Martin had not made good his argument. Brunton pressed his lordship to allow the case to go to the jury.
His lordship thought it quite possible there might be a case to go to the jury. Nevertheless, his lordship felt it his duty to impress on both parties the painfulness, the unnecessary painfulness, of such a case as this. Would not the distinguished counsel on both sides consult with their clients? Surely there must be some way by which--Mr. Justice Mallory coughed judicially--a compromise, if necessary a financial compromise, could be effected.
"Interfering old fool," whispered Brunton to his junior.
Ensued a further orgy of whispering: Lord Arthur, his solicitor and Sir Martin on one side: Brunton, Lady Hermione and Sir Peter on the other. Behind him, Ronnie heard Lady Cynthia's muffled staccato, "I say, she isn't going to settle, is she?" and Miss Elizabeth Cattistock's "If she does, I win my bet."
Now the K.C.'s withdrew from their clients; drew together, still whispering; drew away from each other; whispered with their clients again; and returned to conference.
"I'm afraid it's a wash-out, Cavendish," the leader managed to convey behind his hand as Sir Martin Duckworth rose to address the court.
His lordship and the jury, announced Sir Martin, would not--he was delighted to say--be further troubled with this--er--very painful case. His client had agreed to terms, the financial aspect of which--with his lordship's permission--Sir Martin did not think it necessary to disclose.
Did he understand, interrupted Mr. Justice Malory, that the action would be withdrawn?
Brunton took up the cue. "My client," boomed Brunton, "has consented to withdraw her action; not that she feels her case in any way weakened, but because--acting on your Lordship's advice, and, if I may be allowed to say so, on my own--she has, at the very earnest solicitation of her husband, decided," the K.C.'s voice dropped to its point, "to return to him."
Lady Cynthia's audible "Well, I'm damned!" a little rustle of mannerly applause, and a beam from Mr. Justice Mallory marked the ending of Ellerson v. Ellerson--a happy ending, as it seemed to Lady Hermione's junior counsel.
6
But Hector Brunton thought otherwise. Recently it had seemed to him as though Aliette might relent. Ever since her return from Devonshire he had been conscious of some subtle, incomprehensible change in her. Therefore it piqued his pride to find her, on his return from court, not even vaguely interested in the newspaper reports of his speech--more especially as that speech was quoted almost verbatim under the heading: "K.C. says woman is not man's property."
"We ought to have fought the thing out," he told her. "That's what I said to Cavendish."
Aliette's face did not betray her, but her heart--the heart which had almost persuaded itself of cure--dropped two telltale beats.
"Clever chap, young Cavendish," went on the K.C. "I'd like to have him to dinner one evening."
With a thoughtful "Why not take him to the club, Hector?" the K.C.'s wife went upstairs to dress.