TENTH ENTRY.
DICK FIBBINS, my more or less "learned" instructor in practical law, goes out to a good many evening parties, I find. Casually remarks that he "danced three square dances, the other night, with old DAVIS's ugly daughter, the Solor (legal slang for Solicitor), in Caraway Street." It's DAVIS himself, not the daughter, that is the Solicitor, and, it seems she introduced the gay FIBBINS to her Papa. Hence another brief, a rather complicated one, on some dispute about a mortgage.
On the morning when the case is to come into Court, DICK the Brief-hunter, who has promised to take me there, seems nervous. Yet he is still confident that, if "old PROSER" is the judge, he will "pull the thing off." It will be, apparently, a case of "Pull FIBBINS, pull PROSER."
In Court I occupy a seat just behind him, because—as he observes—I've been "grinding away at the case, and know the subject down to the ground"—which I don't think he does. I therefore am to act as his reserves, also as his prompter, and to supply him with the names of cases which he has forgotten, and which he wishes to quote. Rather a responsible position. Should feel more confidence in result if FIBBINS had told me of this prompter arrangement before the very morning when the trial comes on.
"Old PROSER," appears to my untutored gaze to be rather a dignified occupant of the Bench. I don't know whether he cherishes any personal or professional animosity against DICK FIBBINS, but directly the latter opens his mouth to begin, PROSER seems inclined to jump down it.
"A complicated case of foreclosure?" he growls. "You needn't tell us that. All foreclosure cases are complicated. I ever saw one yet that wasn't."
FIBBINS goes along unimpeded for a minute or two, PROSER having thrown himself back with an air of resigned inattention, one of the other Judges taking furtive notes, and the third resting his elbows on his desk, and his head on his elbows, and eyeing me with a stony and meaningless stare. Can he suddenly have gone mad?
I have no time to consider this interesting point, as FIBBINS is again in difficulties about some precedent that he wants to quote, but which he has forgotten, and turns sharply round on me, saying, in a fierce whisper—
"What the doose is that case?"
I look hurriedly down on the sheet of paper on which (as I fancy) I have jotted down the authorities bearing on the subject, and reply, also in a whisper—"Cookson and Gedge."
"The Court, m'luds," FIBBINS airily proceeds, as if he were indebted entirely to his own memory for the information, "held in Cookson and Gedge that a mortgagor who desires to foreclose—"
"Where is the case you mention?" suddenly asks the Judge who was staring at me a moment ago. He is now engaged in first looking at my instructor suspiciously, and then at me, as if he thought that there was some horrible secret between us, which he is determined to probe to the bottom.
"Volume Six of the Law Reports, m'lud."
"Page?" snaps PROSER.
"Page 184, m'lud. As I was saying, the Court there held that the right to foreclose at any reasonable time is not taken away—"
This time the interruption comes from the Judge who I thought was going mad, but who now seems to be preternaturally and offensively sane.
"It would be odd," he observes, cuttingly, "if any Court had decided a point about mortgages in Cookson versus Gedge, because on looking at the page to which you have referred us, find that Cookson and Gedge was a running-down case!"
I glance at the paper before me in consternation; another moment, and the horrifying fact is revealed to me that the sheet of "authorities" I have brought with me bears, not on the mortgage case now before the Court, but on that previous six-guinea matter on which I had given ROGERS & Co. my valuable Opinion gratis.
I hear DICK FIBBINS, in this trying position, with the eyes of three Judges fixed on him, swearing at me under his breath in the most awful manner. But why did he depend on me? Why didn't he get up the case himself?
Deprived at one blow of most of his precedents, "shorn"—as the Breach of Promise Reports puts it—"of its usual attractions," FIBBINS's speech becomes an impotent affair. He has to quote such cases as he can remember, and as neither his memory nor his legal knowledge is great, he presents them all wrongly, and prematurely sits down. I see PROSER's wrinkled countenance illumined with an exultant smile. Just as I am moving out of Court (FIBBINS has to "move" in Court), because I am desirous of avoiding FIBBINS's wrath,—though I feel that this fiasco is more his fault than mine,—I hear the presiding judge (the mad one) say to the Defendant's Counsel that he need not trouble to address them. I know what that means—judgment for the Defendant!
Chancing half-an-hour later to enter a Strand Restaurant, part of which, I regret to say, is also a drinking-bar, I am startled at beholding the identical form and features of FIBBINS himself. He appears flushed—has two companions with him, to whom he is talking excitedly. I hear the words—"idiot"—"jackass of a pupil"—"regular sell"—and; but no, perhaps I had better not repeat all that I did hear. I decide to seek refreshment elsewhere.
Over the subsequent scene in FIBBINS's Chambers I prefer to draw a veil. It is sufficient to say that I was obliged to leave FIBBINS, and thereafter received a solid half-year's instruction in the Chambers of a learned Counsel who was not a briefless impostor.
I heard afterwards that he had added the story to his fund of legal dining-out anecdotes, and had considerably amplified it. It came out in a shape which made FIBBINS a hero, myself an imbecile of a rather malicious kind, PROSER helplessly cowering under FIBBINS's wealth of arguments, and the other two Judges reduced to admiring silence. I take this opportunity of stating that if anybody "cowered" in Court on that memorable occasion, it was certainly not poor old PROSER.