“One hundred and ninety thirdly (and lastly) Professional Gentlemen, as solicitors, attorneys, proctors, engineers, architects, medical practitioners, artists, literary men, merchants, master manufacturers, scientific professors, and others not engaged in manual labour, farming of land or retail trade, are considered to possess some station in society, although the Law takes no cognizance of their ranks inter se.”
Precedence: from Dod’s Peerage, p. 434.
Chapter One —Monday Evening— Parties to the Deed
First will be set out the Parties, each by his full name and address and by a Description, as, Lieutenant-Colonel in His Majesty’s Grenadier Regiment of Foot-guards, Solicitor to the Supreme Court of Judicature, Clerk in Holy Orders, Butcher, or as the case may be and (where of the female sex) wife, widow, spinster or feme sole.
I
“The thoughts of all present tonight,” said Mr. Birley, “will naturally turn first to the great personal loss—the very great personal loss—so recently suffered by the firm, by the legal profession and, if I may venture to say so without contradiction, by the British public.”
No one did contradict him; partly, no doubt, owing to the fact that Mr. Birley was personally responsible for the salaries of the greater number of those present, but also because the principal speaker at a staff dinner very rarely is contradicted; Mr. Birley, therefore, proceeded.
“It is difficult to speak without emotion of such a loss. Abel Horniman, our founder and our late senior partner, was a man whose name will be long remembered. Even those who are not qualified to appreciate the worth of his legal—ah—laurels, will remember him in connection with those innovations in office management which bear his name. The Horniman Self-Checking Completion System, the Horniman Alphabetical Index—”
“The Horniman High-Powered Raspberry,” said John Cove to his neighbour, Mr. Bohun.
“—Abel Horniman was not only a great lawyer, he was also a great business man. Some of you will remember his boast: ‘In thirty seconds,’ he used to say, ‘I can lay my hand on any paper which has come into this office in the last thirty years.’ How many firms of solicitors, I wonder, could say the same? In this age of slipshod methods, of rule-of-thumb litigation, of printed-form conveyancing, how salutary it is to stop and think for a few moments of the career of a man who learned his law the hard way, a man who had perfected himself in every branch of a solicitor’s work, a man who asked nothing of his subordinates that he could not himself do better—and yet”—Mr. Birley unwound this long relative clause with the ease of a practised conveyancer—“and yet a man who, as we know, was quite prepared to offer freely to his partners and his staff the fruits of his knowledge and his hard work.”
“If he’d offered me a tenth of the money he made, I shouldn’t have said no to it,” observed Mr. Cove, desisting for a moment from his attempts to hit Miss Mildmay, three places away on the opposite side of the table, with a bread pellet.
“A grand old lawyer,” went on Mr. Birley. “The founder and the inspiration of his firm—of our firm—perhaps I may say of our happy family—Horniman, Birley and Craine.”
Sustained applause.
In the Rhodian room of the Colossus restaurant in Holborn one long and three shorter tables were set in the form of a capital “E”, and round them were gathered some fifty men and women ranging in age from an exceedingly venerable party with a white beard, who was sleeping fitfully at one end of the top table, down to three young gentlemen of fifteen-plus (of a type normally described in police reports as “youths”) who had collected at a point furthest from the eye of the chairman and were engaged in a game of blow-football with rolled-up menus and a battered grape.
Miss Mildmay looked up as a bread pellet struck her on the cheek and remarked in a clear voice: “If you hit me again with one of those things, John Cove, I shan’t type any more of your private letters for you in office hours.”
“Delilah,” said John.
Henry Bohun was engaged, meanwhile, in a mathematical computation the answer to which seemed to puzzle him.
“How do they fit them all in?”
“Fit all what into what?” said John Cove.
“Into the office. When Birley was showing me round this afternoon I counted twelve rooms. One was obviously a waiting-room. That leaves eleven. If the partners have a room each—”
“Oh, these aren’t all our people,” said John. “Very few of them, in fact. We control three other firms, you know. Ramussen and Oakshott in the City, Bourlass, Bridewell and Burt in the West End, and Brown, Baxter and thingummybob in some impossible place like Streatham or Brixton—”
An indignant glare from a young man with long hair and a pillar-box red tie warned John that he was speaking perhaps a trifle loudly for the promotion of that happy family feeling which Mr. Birley had just commended.
“Oh Lord,” he went on. “There’s Tubby getting up. I do think all this speechmaking is a mistake.”
Mr. Tristram Craine rose to reply to the toast of “The Firm”. He was a plump little person, in appearance two-thirds of Charles Cheeryble to one-third of Lord Beaverbrook; in fact, an extremely sharp solicitor.
What he said is not important, since one after-dinner speech tends to be very like another. However, it afforded an opportunity for Henry Bohun to take a further quick look round the table in an endeavour to identify some of the people with whom he was going to work.
He himself was the very newest thing in solicitors.
He had qualified precisely three days previously and joined the firm only that afternoon. His single close acquaintance so far was the flippant Mr. Cove. Birley and Craine he knew, of course. The other reverend parties at the head table were, he suspected, the Ramussens, the Oakshotts, the Bourlasses and the Bridewells of the confederate firms.
There was a dark-haired youngster, wearing heavy horn-rimmed spectacles and looking a little out of place among the augurs. He suspected that this might be Bob Horniman, the late Abel Horniman’s son. They had been to the same public school, but Bob had been three years his junior and three years is a long time when it marks the gap between fourteen and seventeen.
Mr. Craine unconsciously resolved this uncertainty for him by saying: “And I feel we should take this opportunity of welcoming our new partner, our founder’s son, who steps forward now to take his father’s place.” (Applause.)
The dark young man blushed so hotly and took off and wiped his spectacles with such unnecessary gusto that Henry concluded that his guess had been correct. He also reflected that to have a great man for a father was not always an entirely comfortable fate.
“A Richard for an Oliver,” said Mr. Cove, reading his thoughts accurately.
“Pardon?” said the young lady on his right.
“Granted as soon as asked,” said Mr. Cove agreeably.
Then there was that man with the rather sharp face and the unidentifiable, but too obviously old-school tie—he’d seen him somewhere about the office. The girl next to him was a good looker, in a powerful sort of way. She was the possessor of auburn hair and very light blue eyes, elements which may be harmless apart but can be explosive when mixed.
“He died,” said Mr. Craine—apparently he had reverted to the founder of the firm—“as I am sure he would have wished to die—in harness. It scarcely seems a month ago that I walked into his room and found him at his desk, his pen grasped in his hand—”