whatever case happen to be down for hearing. I never tire of the aspect
of a court, the ways of a court. Familiarity does but spice them. I
love the cold comfort of the pale oak panelling, the
scurrying-in-and-out of lawyers' clerks, the eagerness and ominousness
of it all, the rustle of silk as a K.C. edges his way to his seat and
twists his head round for a quick whispered parley with his junior,
while his client, at the solicitors' table, twists his head round to
watch feverishly the quick mechanical nods of the great man's wig--the
wig that covers the skull that contains the brain that so awfully much
depends on. I love the mystery of those dark-green curtains behind the
exalted Bench. One of them will anon be plucked aside, with a
stentorian 'Silence!' Thereat up we jump, all of us as though worked by
one spring; and in shuffles swiftly My Lord, in a robe well-fashioned
for sitting in, but not for walking in anywhere except to a bath-room.
He bows, and we bow; subsides, and we subside; and up jumps some
grizzled junior--'My Lord, may I mention to your Lordship the case of
"Brown v. Robinson and Another"?' It is music to me ever, the cadence
of that formula. I watch the judge as he listens to the application,
peering over his glasses with the lack-lustre eyes that judges have,
eyes that stare dimly out through the mask of wax or parchment that
judges wear. My Lord might be the mummy of some high tyrant revitalised
after centuries of death and resuming now his sway over men. Impassive
he sits, aloof and aloft, ramparted by his desk, ensconced between
curtains to keep out the draught--for might not a puff of wind scatter
the animated dust that he consists of? No creature of flesh and blood
could impress us quite as he does, with a sense of puissance quite so
dispassionate, so supernal. He crouches over us in such manner that we
are all of us levelled one with another, shorn of aught that elsewhere
differentiates us. The silk-gownsmen, as soon as he appears, fade to
the semblance of juniors, of lawyers' clerks, of jurymen, of oneself.
Always, indeed, in any public place devoted to some special purpose,
one finds it hard to differentiate the visitors, hard to credit them
with any private existence. Cast your eye around the tables of a cafe':
how subtly similar all the people seem! How like a swarm of gregarious
insects, in their unity of purpose and of aspect! Above all, how
homeless! Cast your eye around the tables of