BY WAY OF COUNTERCLAIM.
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.