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!