His Client's Case

His Client's Case by Bernard Capes

Mr. Justice Ganthony recalls his impoverished beginnings as a young barrister in a miserable attic at Furnival’s Inn. With no briefs and little money, he gradually pawns or sells his possessions, endures hunger, and waits vainly for footsteps that never reach his door. One November evening, however, a stranger climbs all the way to his chambers and offers him his first case. The visitor, an oddly dressed, red-faced man with enormous white whiskers and antiquated spectacles, seeks a young and inexperienced advocate willing to work on speculation. He introduces his client, Buggins, a supposedly brilliant but persecuted company-promoter whose speciality has been bizarre insurance schemes. Buggins has devised policies against waterspouts, death in diving-bells, broken hearts, official strangulation, lightning disfigurement, starvation, ghost-seeing, novel-writing, and bachelorhood. His later enterprises exploit the principle of profitable self-denial: one insurance scheme denies payment to anyone who admits being seriously ill, while another protects travellers against brigandage on production of a severed nose, ear, or other organ supposedly sent as proof of ransom. The visitor praises Buggins’s greatest conception, the Purgatory Mutual, a tontine in which the last person to leave Purgatory would take the pool. He insists that Buggins’s enemies maliciously called him mad. Buggins then tested an insurance scheme against death from flying-machines by personally experimenting with aerostatics, only to land in the grounds of a private asylum. Though he claims he was mistaken for an inmate, he says he has been imprisoned there ever since. Suddenly tearing off his disguise, the visitor reveals that he himself is Buggins and appoints Ganthony to sue the Commissioners of Lunacy. Asylum attendants enter and calmly reclaim him. They explain that Buggins had escaped during private theatricals at Flyborough Asylum, using his costume as a family lawyer, and had made his way to Furnival’s Inn because his former offices had been there. One attendant suggests that Buggins has deceived Ganthony with his stories, since his lifelong principle was to play upon fools.

By Bernard Capes · First published 1913 · Genre: Comic Short Story, Satire, Humorous Fiction · 3,667 words

First lines

The "Personal Reminiscences" of the late Mr. Justice Ganthony, now in process of being edited, are responsible for the following drollery: -

My first "chambers" were on the top, not to say the attic, floor of a house in (the now defunct) Furnival's Inn. I called _it_ "chambers," in the plural, on the strength of a coal-cellar, in the window-seat, and a turn-up bedstead which became a cupboard by day. That accounted for two rooms, and "the usual offices," as the house-agents say, when they refer to a kitchen six feet by eight in the basement. Trousers, after all, are only one garment, although they are called a pair.

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Victorian London · Furnival's Inn · young barrister · impoverished beginnings · legal profession · briefless lawyer · attic chambers · hunger and poverty · black comedy · satirical short story · unreliable client · madness and sanity

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His Client's Case is listed on Textopian as a short story by Bernard Capes, dated 1913 CE.

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