I.
There are office buildings still standing in down-town New York where the occupant does not merge his identity with the numerals on his door. But they are very old buildings and the tenants are apt to be as old-fashioned as their surroundings. It was in one of these venerable piles that Clayton Sargent passed his legal apprenticeship, and perhaps this explains some things in his career which are otherwise inexplicable.
When Sargent was first ushered into the offices of Messrs. Harding, Peyton, Merrill and Van Standt he found a suite of plainly furnished rooms connected by green baize doors and surrounded by law books from floor to ceiling. The desks were large and dignified—almost learned in their solidity, as though they had soaked in all the wisdom that had dripped from the pens and all the experience of the pen holders.—The large iron safe built into the wall of the rear room looked a very monster of mystery from whose cavernous jaws no secrets would ever escape, and in whose keeping confidences were secure as with the Sphinx.
No sound of the typewriter was ever heard in those rooms, though the crackle and snapping of the soft cannel coal in the open fireplaces would occasionally lure someone into betting that “the Ancients had surrendered.” No telephone ever tinkled its call inside those doors and no member of the firm ever learned to use that instrument.
Harding, Peyton, Merrill and Van Standt’s law papers were a joke in the profession. They were engrossed on parchment-like paper and tied with blue or red silk string, and if a seal was used two bits of ribbon always protruded from its edge. But those who read these documents, though they laughed at the outside, respected the inside, for “the Ancients” had a large practice and knew how to keep it.
“They’re harmless old birds,” said Elmendorff, whose place Sargent was taking, “but utterly impractical. I’ve been three years in a live office and I tell you I couldn’t stand this. You’ll waste your time here. Why, not a week ago I heard old man Peyton tell a client that he’d better put everything on the altar of compromise and then offer to divide, rather than get into litigation. They’re dying of dry rot. You can’t get up a scrap here to save your eternal. Just think of this for instance. Last month I began an action for the Staunton Manufacturing Company against Mundel and it was dead open and shut, too. Well, in walks Harding one morning madder than hops. ‘How did this get in the office?’ says he, waiving the complaint. I told him I advised the plaintiffs that they had a good case. ‘Good case!’ he roars. ‘There’s not the slightest justice in the claim—not a scintilla of justice, Sir!’ ‘But we can win,’ I told him, and I showed the old fool where the defendant had slipped up in the wording of his contract and how we had him cold. Well, darn me, if he didn’t get hotter under the collar than before, asking me if I thought his firm were hired tricksters and bravos and I don’t know what. Finally he bundled all the papers back to the Staunton Company and wrote them they oughtn’t to sue. That settled me, and so I told them I’d have to get out into the world again before the moss grew. It’s a pity, too, for they’ve really got a smooth lot of clients if they only knew how to work them.”
So Elmendorff departed, but no one ever heard that he took any of the Ancients’ practice with him.
It was this atmosphere which Sargent breathed for three years, and perhaps, as has been said, that may account for some of his many eccentricities and explain, in a measure, his treatment of Fenton.
Fenton had married the daughter of Brayton Garland, one of Mr. Harding’s clients, and when his wife sued him for divorce he brought the papers to Sargent.
It was in offices very different from the Ancients’ that Fenton found his counsel. They were on the 17th floor of the Titan Building, on lower Broadway, where the draught in the hall steadily sucked a stream of people into elevators, which, with the regularity of trip-hammers, shot them up breathless and dropped them gasping.
There were three law firms in the same suite with Sargent,—four attorneys “on their own hook,” a Seamless Mattress Company, an Electric Drying Company and a Collection Agency. Typewriters clicked in every room, messengers clattered up and down the long hallway, brass gates on the railed-off spaces swung to and fro crashing with every swing, the telephones sung a constant chorus, electric bells buzzed and tinkled, doors banged, papers rustled, voices droned or struck the air in sharp staccato, and yet in the midst of all this restless human energy there were times when Sargent felt lonely. It was not merely that he missed the atmosphere of quiet and study, but the very rush and scramble seemed to generate ideas and actions foreign to the code of professional ethics and dignity which governed the Ancients.
Sometimes the denizens of the Titan Building discussed the matter with him.
“Theoretically your venerable friends are all right,” a brilliant, pushing young lawyer told him one day. “The man who lives by maxims in this day and generation will have food for thought, but he’ll never earn his salt. We start with the same point of view, but——”
He shrugged his shoulders.
“But someone throws gold-dust in our eyes?” suggested Sargent.
“Bosh!” was the retort. “Don’t talk the cant of the incompetent. The Bar is of a higher average to-day than it ever was before.”
But despite the “high average,” Sargent often felt himself a solitary outsider looking on at the mad clamour and pitiless pursuit and wondering if it was worth all it seemed to cost. A defect in early education—this pausing to think—for philosophers on lower Broadway are apt to have but brief careers.
“There’s nothing in the case,” Fenton told his counsel, who sat gazing out of the window at the tiny human ants crawling in and out of the stone heaps in the street below.
Sargent looked narrowly at his client, but the side face told him nothing, so he made no comment and Fenton continued,
“I don’t know why she wants to drag us into court. I suppose some long-whiskered tabby has been telling her I ought to stay home every night. Say, Sargent, isn’t there some way of bringing her to her senses?”
The speaker turned from the window with a gesture of impatience, and Sargent studied the handsome though somewhat boyish face. He knew Fenton for an easy-going fellow, but no fool. He was a young man who had earned his money by his own brains, acquiring all the self-confidence and other characteristics, good and bad, which accompany achievement. There was strength of character in his face, and a certain firmness of purpose about the mouth that suggested something which the clear blue eyes contradicted.
“You say there is nothing in the case,” Sargent answered. “Why do you suppose she brings suit? I don’t know Mrs. Fenton, of course, but women are not anxious as a rule to get themselves into court. Have you tried to see her and obtain an explanation?”
“Lord, no! If you knew her you’d see how useless it would be. There’s no way out of this except by showing her we mean business. She’s nearly killed all the affection I ever had for her by this nonsense, but I want it stopped—and stopped right now.”
The suggestive lines of Fenton’s mouth were strongly marked as he snapped out the last words.
“If you no longer love your wife,—am I to understand that you want a divorce? Have you anything to set up by way of counterclaim?”
“By way of counterclaim? No.—Yes, I have. I want the children.”
Sargent smiled. “That’s hardly a counterclaim,” he answered.
“Well, it’s counterclaim enough for me.—That’s just the thing. You push that and we’ll see about the rest afterwards. If she wants to go into court she’ll have to go without the children.”
Fenton’s mouth was firmly set, and its lines were almost grim. The boyish look had faded, and without it his features developed coarseness.
Sargent hesitated.
“Mr. Fenton,” he said at last, “I don’t like these cases, and when a man dislikes his work, you know, he’s not apt to do it well. I think you would do better to retain other counsel.”
“Now that’s all nonsense, Sargent. You are just the man for me. I don’t want one of those advertising roarers who’ll have us in every paper. I want this thing stopped. You’ll only have to apply for the children and that’ll end it. There are plenty of legal ruffians to be had. I have chosen you because you are a gentleman and know how this business should be handled.”
There was no note of flattery in Fenton’s tone.
“But, Mr. Fenton, admitting there is nothing in the case, the custody of the children is still a matter resting wholly in the discretion of the Court and you may not succeed. Mr. Harding is an excellent lawyer and will doubtless make a good fight. You remember, of course, that I was in his office some years ago?”
Fenton looked sharply at his counsel and his eyes narrowed slightly as he answered.
“Well, that doesn’t make any difference, does it? It ought to be all the better. You must know all the old chap’s tricks.”
There was a suggestion of cunning about the man which completely transformed him for a moment. His watchful eyes, however, read the doubt in Sargent’s face and bespoke a charming sincerity as he added:
“Why, of course, I knew you were brought up with ‘the Ancients,’ Sargent. I was only joking. But that is merely another reason why you are best fitted to undertake this case. If it were the ordinary divorce dirt I wouldn’t ask you to plough it up. But it’s not. Mr. Harding knows you and you will be able to approach him easily. Mrs. Fenton has been poorly advised, I think, but the mischief’s not yet wholly done. Make your ‘motion’ or whatever you call it, and then you’ll find the rest is easy. I know you can handle the matter as few men could. I’ve wanted to give you some business for a long time and I’m sorry to begin with this. However, it will not be the last, you know.”
Sargent had built up a fair practice since he left “the Ancients,” but this was the first time he had ever been opposed to them. He confessed to himself that he did not like it.
Fenton was not wholly convincing, but if he did not take up this case someone else would. If he was better than his profession it was high time to retire from it. Then, too, Mr. Harding was growing old, and doubtless the woman deceived by silly stories had deceived him. Very probably, as Fenton said, the first aggressive move would settle the whole affair. What fools women were to listen to every Old Wife who came along with idle tittle-tattle seeking recruits for the great Army of the Misunderstood! Fenton’s business was worth having, and if this matter went well there was no knowing where it might lead. Moreover all the essential facts were in the defendant’s favour, and as Sargent skilfully set them forth in his “moving papers” he experienced that subtle influence, known to every lawyer, which can turn the most judicial counsel into a partisan, and make the silliest quarrel a matter of deadly moment between strangers to its cause.