It is an interesting place that rotunda—a trifle impossible, perhaps, from an academic point of view,—but still an interesting place.
It is the big noisy ante-chamber to the stuffy court rooms of a big noisy city. It has an atmosphere of tobacco, shirt sleeves and hurry—an atmosphere of the people—its architecture is big and plain—an architecture for the people, and its dirt and smears bespeak a daily use and occupation by the people.
To the casual visitor the same persons seem to live in it all the year round. To the habitué the masses are kaleidoscopic—never and yet ever the same. Messengers,—process-servers, office boys—all the fledglings of the law gather there in groups and blow cigarette smoke into each other’s faces. Court officials loll about the railing patronising the managing clerks, who must cultivate them or yield all claims to management. Big-girthed men hold one another by watch chains and lapels and tell loud-mouthed stories of their triumphant practice. Bloated gentlemen and shifty seek out corners to breathe moist secrets into each other’s ears. But heedless of all these a hurrying crowd is ever streaming this way and that—here a haggard face and there a laughing one—now a brutal type and now a mask of breeding—so they go—shuffle, shuffle, click-a-clack, all day long, outside the halls of Justice.
Holden pushed open the swinging doors labelled
SPECIAL TERM
PART I.
and entered a small court room crowded to suffocation. Every seat was occupied and men were standing about everywhere—jammed in between the chairs—plastered against the wall—crushed against the rail. The counsels’ table and its two chairs were the only unoccupied bits of furniture in the room.
The Court criers glanced despairingly at the throng and shouted mechanically, “Gentlemen will please take seats!” and then, more hopefully, “Gentlemen will please stop talking!”
But the babel of conversation was finally hushed by an attendant who announced the entrance of the Judge by pounding with an ample fist upon the panels of a door. Not a very dignified heralding of the presence of the Court, but understood by the late comers whose view is limited to the judicial canopy—that pall-like canopy of red rep which sets one panting to gaze with relief at the steam-screened windows. They at least are wet.
“Grafton vs. The Milling Companies!”
Holden fought his way like a foot-ball player through the “rush line” of lawyers, and as he pitched into the cleared space before the counsels’ table his impulse was to dodge the one man before him and race down “the side-line.” But he checked himself in time. Then two other young men plunged into the open and stood somewhat breathlessly before the Bench.