Toppleton's Client; Or, A Spirit in Exile, Page 2

  CHAPTER II.

  MR. HOPKINS TOPPLETON LEASES AN OFFICE.

  IT did not take Hopkins many days to discover that a life of elegantleisure in London approximates labour of the hardest sort. Nor was itentirely easy for him to spend his one thousand pounds a month, withlodgings for his headquarters. This fact annoyed him considerably, forhe valued money only for what it could bring him, and yet how else tolive than in lodgings he could not decide. Hotel life he abhorred, notonly because he considered its excellence purely superficial, but alsobecause it brought him in contact with what he called his "flash-lightfellow countrymen, with Wagnerian voices and frontier manners"--by whichI presume he meant the diamond studded individuals who travel on Cook'sTickets, and whose so-called Americanism is based on the notion thatBritons are still weeping over the events of '76, and who love to sendpatriotic allusions to the star-spangled banner echoing down throughthe corridors of the hotels, out and along the Thames Embankment, tothe very doors of parliament itself.

  "Why don't you buy a house-boat?" asked one of his cronies, to whom hehad confided his belief that luxurious ease was hard on theconstitution. "Then you can run off up the Thames, and loaf away thetedious hours of your leisure."

  "That's an idea worth considering," he replied, "and perhaps I'll try iton next summer. I do not feel this year, however, that I ought to desertLondon, considering the responsibilities of my position."

  "What are you talking about?" said the other with a laugh."Responsibilities! Why, man, you haven't been to your office since youarrived."

  "No," returned Hoppy, "I haven't. In fact I haven't got an office to 'beto.' That's what bothers me so like thunder. I've looked at plenty ofoffices advertised as for rent for legal firms, but I'll be hanged if Ican find anything suitable. Your barristers over here have not as goodaccommodations as we give obsolete papers at home. Our pigeon-holes arepalatial in comparison with your office suites, and accustomed as I amto breathing fresh air, I really can't stand the atmosphere I have beencompelled to take into my lungs in the rooms I have looked at."

  "But, my dear fellow, what more than a pigeon-hole do you need?" askedhis friend. "You are not called upon to attend to any business here. Apost-office box would suffice for the receipt of communications fromAmerica."

  "That's all true enough," returned Hopkins, "but where am I to keep mylaw library? And what am I to do in case I should have a client?"

  "Keep your books in your lodgings, and don't count your clients beforethey get into litigation," replied the other.

  "My dear Tutterson," Hopkins said in answer to this, "you are thequeerest mixture of common sense and idiotcy I have ever encountered. Mylibrary at home, indeed! Haven't you any better sense than to suggest mycarrying my profession into my home life? Do you suppose I want to bereminded at every step I take that I am a lawyer? Must my business berammed down my throat at all hours? Am I never to have relaxation fromoffice cares? Indeed, I'll not have a suggestion of law within a mile ofmy lodgings! I must have an office; but now that I think of it, nothaving to go to the office from one year's end to another, it makes nodifference whether it consists of the ground floor of Buckingham Palaceor a rear cell three flights up, in Newgate Prison."

  "Except," returned Tutterson, "that if you had the office at Newgate youmight do more business than if you shared Buckingham Palace with theRoyal family."

  "Yes; and on the other hand, the society at the palace is probably moredesirable than that of Newgate; so each having equal advantages, I thinkI'd better compromise and take an office out near the Tower," saidHopkins. "The location is quite desirable from my point of view. Itwould be so inaccessible that I should have a decent excuse for notgoing there, and besides, I reduce my chances of being embarrassed by aclient to a minimum."

  "That is where you are very much mistaken," said Tutterson. "If you hangyour shingle out by the Tower, you will be one lawyer among a hundredBeef-Eaters, and therefore distinguished, and likely to be sought out byclients. On the other hand, if you behave like a sensible man, and takechambers in the Temple, you'll be an unknown attorney among a thousandQ.C's. And as for the decent excuse for not attending to business, yousimply forget that you are no longer in America but in England. Here aman needs an excuse for going to work. Trade is looked down upon. It isthe butterfly we esteem, not the grub. A man who _will_ work when hedoesn't need to work, is looked upon with distrust. Society doesn'tcultivate him, and the million regard him with suspicion,--and theposition of both is distinctly logical. He who serves is a servant, andsociety looks upon him as such, and when he insists upon serving withoutthe necessity to serve, he diminishes by just so much the opportunitiesof some poor devil to whom opportunity is bread and butter, which setsthe poor devil against him. You do not need an excuse for neglectingbusiness, Toppleton, and, by Jove, if it wasn't for your beastlyAmerican ideas, you'd apologize to yourself for even thinking of such athing."

  "Well, I fancy you are right," replied Toppleton. "To tell you thetruth, I never thought of it in that light before. There is value in aleisure class, after all. It keeps the peach-blow humanity fromcompeting with the earthenware, to the disadvantage of the latter. I seenow why the lower and middle classes so dearly love the lords and dukesand other noble born creatures Nature has set above them. It is thegenerous self-denial of the aristocracy in the matter of work, and theconsequent diminution of competition, that is the basis of that love.I'll do as you say, and see what I can do in the Temple. Even if aclient should happen to stray in at one of those rare moments when I amon duty, I can assume a weary demeanour and tell him that I have alreadymore work on my hands than I can accomplish with proper deference to myhealth, and request him to take his quarrel elsewhere."

  So the question was settled. An office was taken in the Temple. Hopkinsbought himself a wig and a gown, purchased a dozen tin boxes, eachlabelled with the hypothetical name of some supposititious client, hadthe room luxuriously fitted up, arranged his law library, consisting ofthe "Comic Blackstone," "Bench and Bar," by Sergeant Ballantyne, the"Newgate Calendar," and an absolute first of "Parsons on Contracts," onthe mahogany shelves he had had constructed there; hung out a shingleannouncing himself and firm as having headquarters within, and, placingbeneath it a printed placard to the effect that he had gone out tolunch, he turned the key in the door and departed with Tutterson for atrip to the land of the Midnight Sun.

  Now it so happened, that the agent having in charge the particularsection of the Temple in which Hopkins' new office was located, hadconcealed from the young American the fact that for some twenty-five orthirty years, the room which Toppleton had leased had remainedunoccupied--that is, it had never been occupied for any consecutiveperiod of time during that number of years. Tenants had come but had asquickly gone. There was something about the room that no one seemed ableto cope with. Luxuriously furnished or bare, it made no difference inthe fortunes of Number 17, from the doors of which now projected thesign of Toppleton, Morley, Harkins, Perkins, Mawson, Bronson, Smithers,and Hicks. Just what the trouble was, the agent had not been able todetermine in a manner satisfactory to himself until about a year beforeHopkins happened in to negotiate with him for a four years' lease.Departing tenants, when they had spoken to him at all on the subject,had confined themselves to demands for a rebate on rents paid inadvance, on the rather untenable ground that the room was uncanny anddepressing.

  "We can't stand it," they had said, earnestly. "There must be some awfulmystery connected with the room. There has been a murder, or a suicide,or some equally dreadful crime committed within its walls at some timeor another."

  This, of course, the agent always strenuously denied, and his bookssubstantiated his denial. The only possible crime divulged by the books,was thirty-three years back when an occupant departed without paying hisrent, but that surely did not constitute the sort of crime that wouldwarrant the insinuation that the room was haunted.

  "And as for your statement that the room makes you feel weird anddepressed," the agen
t had added with the suggestion of a sneer, "I amsure there is nothing in the terms of the lease which binds me to keeptenants in a natural and cheerful frame of mind. I can't help it, youknow, if you get the blues or eat yourselves into a state that makesthat room seem to you to be haunted."

  "But," one expostulating tenant had observed, "but, my dear sir, I amgiven to understand that the five tenants preceding my occupancy leftfor precisely the same reason, that the office at times is suffocatinglyweird; and that undefined whispers are to be heard playing at puss inthe corner with heart-rending sighs at almost any hour of the day ornight throughout the year, cannot be denied."

  "Well, all I've got to say about that," was the agent's invariablereply, "is that _I_ never saw a sigh or heard a whisper of asupernatural order in that room, and if you want to go to law with acase based on a Welsh rarebit diet, just do it. If the courts decidethat I owe you money, and must forfeit my lease rights because you havedyspepsia, I'll turn over the whole business to you and join the army."

  Of course this independent attitude of the agent always settled thequestion at once. His tenants, however insane they might appear to theagent's eyes, were invariably sane enough not to carry the matter to thecourts, where it was hardly possible that a plaintiff could be relievedof the conditions of his contract, because his office gave him a megrim,super-induced by the visit of a disembodied sigh.

  Judges are hard-headed, practical persons, who take no stock in spiritsnot purely liquid, realizing which the tenants of Number 17, withoutexception, wisely resolved to suffer in silence, invariably leaving theroom, however, in a state of disuse encouraging to cobwebs, which wouldhave delighted the soul of a connoisseur in wines.

  "If I can't make the rent of the room, I can at least raise cobwebs forinnkeepers to use in connection with their wine cellars," said the agentto himself with a sad chuckle, which showed that he was possessed of acertain humorous philosophy which must have been extremely consoling tohim.

  At the end of three years of abortive effort to keep the room rented,impelled partly by curiosity to know if anything really was the matterwith the office, partly by a desire to relieve the building of the odiumunder which the continued emptiness of one of its apartments had placedit, the agent moved into Number 17 himself.

  His tenancy lasted precisely one week, at the end of which time he movedout again. He, too, had heard the undefined whispers and disembodiedsighs; he, too, had trembled with awe when the uncanny quality of theatmosphere clogged up his lungs and set his heart beating at a gallopingpace; he, too, decided that so far as he was concerned life in thatoffice was intolerable, and he acted accordingly. He departed, and fromthat moment No. 17 was entered on his books no longer as for rent as anoffice, but was transferred to the list of rooms mentioned as desirablefor storage purposes.

  To the agent's credit be it said that when Hopkins Toppleton came alongand desired to rent the apartment for office use his first impulse wasto make a clean breast of the matter, and to say to him that in his ownopinion and that of others the room was haunted and had been so for manyyears; but when he reflected that his conscience, such as it was, alongwith the rest of his being, was in the employ of the proprietors of thebuilding, he felt that it was his duty to hold his peace. Toppleton hadbeen informed that the room was useful chiefly for storage purposes, andif he chose to use it as an office, it was his own affair. In additionto this, the agent had a vague hope that Hopkins, being an American andused to all sorts of horrible things in his native land--such asboa-constrictors on the streets, buffaloes in the back yard, and Indiansswarming in the suburbs of the cities,--would be able to cope with theinvisible visitant, and ultimately either subdue or drive thedisembodied sigh into the spirit vale. In view of these facts,therefore, it was not surprising that when Hopkins had finally signed afour years' lease and had taken possession, the agent should give a sighof relief, and, on his return home, inform his wife that she might treatherself to a new silk dress.

  During the few weeks which elapsed between the signing of the lease andHopkins' ostensible departure on a three months' lunching tour, he waswatched with considerable interest by the agent, but, until the "Gone toLunch" placard was put up, the latter saw no sign that Hopkins haddiscovered anything wrong with the office, and even then the agentthought nothing about it until the placard began to accumulate dust.Then he shook his head and silently congratulated himself that the renthad been paid a year in advance; "for," he said, "if he hasn't gone toNew York to lunch, the chances are that that sigh has got to work againand frightened him into an unceremonious departure." Neither of whichhypotheses was correct, for as we have already heard, Hopkins haddeparted for Norway.

  As for the sigh, the young lawyer had heard it but once. That was whenhe was about leaving the room for his three months' tour, and he hadattributed it to the soughing of the wind in the trees outside of hiswindow, which was indeed an error, as he might have discovered at thetime had he taken the trouble to investigate, for there were no treesoutside of his window through whose branches a wind could have soughedeven if it had been disposed to do so.