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.
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