XVIII
That peculiar form of human activity, or inactivity, known as getting a law practice, has been so abundantly treated on the printed page that I have not the temerity to add to the literature on the interesting subject. The experience is never dramatic, even if it is sometimes tragic, and it is so often tragic that there has seemed no other recourse for mankind than, by one of those tacit understandings on which our race gets through life, to view it as a comedy. It is no comedy, of course, to the chief actor, who is sustained only by his dreams, his illusions, and his ideals, and he may count himself successful perhaps, if, when he has lost his illusions, he can retain at least some of his ideals, though the law is too apt to strip him of both. However that may be, in my own experience in that sort there was an incident which made its peculiar impressions; indeed, there were several such incidents, but the one which I have in mind involves the perhaps commonplace story of Maria R——, which ran like a serial during those trying years.
I had intended to take up the practice of law in Chicago; I was quite certain that there I should set up my little enterprise, and this self-same certainty is perhaps the reason why I found myself back in Toledo, in a lonely little office in one of the new office buildings; sky-scrapers they were called in the new sense of metropolitan life that then began to pervade the town; they were not so veryhigh, but they seemed high enough to scrape the low skies which arch so many of the grey days in the lake region. It was as long ago, I believe, as the time of Pythagoras that the law of the certain uncertainty of certainty was deduced for the humbling of human pride, and when my certainties with regard to Chicago proved all to be broken reeds, there were more gray days in that region of the intemperate zone than the meteorological records show. The little law office had a portrait of William Dean Howells on its walls, and in time the portraits of other writers, differing from those other law offices which prefer to be adorned with pictures of Chief Justice Marshall—a strong man, of course, who wrote some strong fiction, too, in his day—and of Hamilton and of Jefferson, indicating either a catholicity or a confusion of principle on the part of the occupying proprietor, of which usually he is not himself aware. There were a few law-books, too, and on the desk a little digest of the law of evidence as affected by the decisions of the Ohio courts. I had the noble intention of mastering it, but I did not read in it very much, since for a long while there was no one to pay me for doing so, and I spent most of my hours at my desk over a manuscript of “The 13th District,†a novel of politics I was then writing, looking up now and then and gazing out of the window at the blank rear walls of certain brick buildings which made a dreary prospect, even if one of them did bear, as I well remember, the bright and reassuring legend, “Money to Loan at 6 per cent.â€
There were not many interruptions at first, but after a while, when I had been appointed as attorney to a humane society, there were times when I had to lay my manuscripts aside. I felt it to be, in a way, my duty to long for such interruptions, but they usually came just at those times when I was most absorbed in my manuscript, so that their welcome, while affectedly polite, was not wholly from the heart. One of these intrusions resulted in a long trial before a justice of the peace; it was a case that grew out of a neighborhood quarrel, and all the inhabitants of thelocus in quowere subpœnaed as witnesses. Such a case of course always affords an opportunity to study human nature; but this one, too, had the effect ultimately of bringing in many clients—and, as Altgeld had said, by way of advice to me, got people in the habit of coming to my office. Those witnesses acquired that habit, and since human nature seemed to run pretty high in that neighborhood most of the time, they got into a good deal of trouble; they were most of them so poor that they seldom got into anything else, unless it were the jail or the workhouse, and some of them were always ready to help send others of them to those places. Out of the long file of poor miserable creatures there emerged one day that Maria R—— of whom I spoke. She was a buxom young German emigrant, not long over from Pomerania, and her fair skin and yellow hair, and a certain manner she had, marked her out from all the rest. She came with her children one morning to complain of her husband’s neglect of them; and to her, as to thewhole body of society which thinks no more deeply than she did, it seemed the necessary, proper, and even indispensable thing to put Rheinhold—that was her husband’s name—in jail (You should have heard her speak the name Rheinhold, with that delicious note in which shegrasséyédher r’s.) There she sat, on the little chair by the window, with her stupidly staring boy and girl at her knees, but in her arms the brightest, prettiest, flaxen-haired baby in the world, a little elf who was always smiling, and picking at her mother’s nose or cheeks with her fat little fingers, and when she smiled, her mother smiled, too; it was the only time she ever did.
Rheinhold of course drank; he “mistreated†his children—that is, he did not buy them food. And since the Humane Society was organized and maintained for the explicit purpose of forcing people to be humane, even though it had to be inhumane to accomplish its purpose, the duty of its attorney was clear.
Its attorney just then felt in himself a rising indignation, moral of course, yet very much like a vulgar anger. To look at those children, especially at that baby of which Maria was so fond, much fonder it was plain to be seen than of the other two, and to think of a man not providing for them, was to have a rage against him, the rage which society, so remorselessly moral in the mass, bears against all offenders—the rage a good prosecutor must keep alive and flaming in his breast if he would nerve himself to his task and earn his feesand society’s gratitude. And whom does society reward so lavishly as her prosecutors?
However, that is not the strain I would adopt just now. I felt that very rage in myself at that moment, and straightway went and had Rheinhold arrested and haled before a judge in the Municipal Court, charged with the crime of neglecting his children. I can remember his wild and bewildered look as he was arraigned that morning. The information was read to him, and he moved his head in such instant acquiescence that the judge, looking down from his bench, asked him if he wished to plead guilty, and he said “Yes.†It seemed then that the case was to be quite easily disposed of, and the prosecutor might feel gratified by this instant success of his work; and yet Rheinhold stood there so confused, so frightened, with the court-room loungers looking on, that I said:
“He doesn’t understand a word of all you are saying.â€
And so the judge entered a plea of “not guilty.â€
I knew a young lawyer with rather large leisure, and I asked him to defend Rheinhold. He was glad to do so, and we empaneled a jury and went at what Professor Wigmore calls the “high-class sport.†We became desperately interested of course, and for days wrangled according to the rules of the game over the liberty of the bewildered little German who scarcely knew what it was all about. Now and then he made some wild, inarticulate protest, but was of course promptly silenced by his own lawyer, or by the judge, or by the rules of evidence, whichcould be invoked—with a deep sense of satisfaction when the court ruled your way—to prevent him from telling something he had on his mind, something that to him seemed entirely exculpatory, something that would make the whole clouded situation clear if it could only find its way to the light and to the knowledge of mankind.
There was a witness against him, a tall, slender young German shoemaker, and it was against him that Rheinhold’s outcries were directed. It was not clear just what he was trying to say, and there was small disposition to help him make it clear. His lawyer indeed seemed embarrassed, as though in making his incoherent interruptions Rheinhold were committing acontretemps; he must wait for his turn to testify, that all might be done in order and according to the ancient rules and precedents, and, in a word, as it should be done. Under the rules of evidence, of course, Rheinhold could not be allowed to express his opinion of the shoemaker; that was not permissible. The court could not be concerned with the passions of the human heart; this man before the court had a family, and he had neglected to provide food for it, and for such a condition it was written and printed in a book that the appropriate remedy was a certain number of days or months in the workhouse.
And so while Rheinhold silently and philosophically acquiesced, we tried him during one whole day, we argued nearly all the next day to the jury, and the jury stayed out all that night and in the morning returned a verdict of guilty. AndRheinhold was sent to the workhouse for nine months.