CHAPTER ONE
"Well, what do you propose? Come down to facts. It's all very interesting and ethical, this harangue of yours; I wouldn't ask any better if I were the defendants' counsel, but, as the opposition, it is not in line. Are you seriously suggesting that this firm refuse the case?"
"Exactly. I thought I made that plain at the beginning of my 'harangue.'"
John Lowell drew in his upper lip, frowned and swayed slowly back and forth, as was his habit when thinking out some intricate point of law. But, by the nervous tapping of the fingers upon the desk, Roger Barton knew that the other was not analyzing a point of law. He was angry and would continue to sway thoughtfully and tap with long, slim fingers until he had fashioned a verbal sword with which to slash Roger's repression to bits; then, smiling, would watch Roger flounder from abstraction to personality, and drown in the sea of his own anger. Roger Barton's wide mouth closed in a firm line.
At her stenographer's desk by the window, Anne Mitchell leaned across her machine, her eyes on the younger man. In the year of her secretaryship she had seen few men defy John Lowell and none emerge with dignity from the interval of his silent tapping.
"Well?"
Still Roger did not speak. Neither did he knit his brows nor make any outward sign of searching for a more cogent argument than the one he had already advanced. His blue eyes summed up the man in the chair and held his deduction quietly for the other to read. Against that look John Lowell's pretense of calmness finally splintered.
"If we don't, some one else will; and it's eight thousand a year for whoever gets the Morgan work."
Anne Mitchell rose and came round her desk. There she stopped, as Lowell reached the end of his sentence, and stood leaning against the edge. Standing so, she was slighter even than one would expect, almost frail but for a kind of compactness, a perfection of bodily finish that allowed no such waste of material as physical weakness. If Anne had been a few inches taller, or twenty pounds heavier; if she had been more sharply defined instead of being a small portion of space cased in a body for the convenience of physical motion; if she had obstructed attention instead of being almost fluid in the unobtrusiveness of her movements, she would long ago have doubled her twenty dollars a week. As it was, on the few occasions when John Lowell lent her to other members of the firm, they always looked puzzled for a moment: "Mitchell? Oh, sure, send her along. Good." And gave Anne twice the amount of work they had intended.
"Well?" John Lowell drew out his watch, murmured "four twenty-seven!" as if he were noting the amount to be charged later, and slipped his watch back. "You don't seem to have anything very constructive to offer, do you, Barton? Our not taking the case won't save your friends on the hill."
"No. Neither did your refusing that railroad franchise case save the public."
The older man smiled at the reference. "Too sticky. That would have smelled to high Heaven."
"Not a bit stickier or smellier than this." Roger now took a step forward, as if to insure the aim of his words through the unexpected aperture of the other's momentary honesty. "The only difference is, that you can put this over without publicity. The smell would never get beyond the office. No one would whiff the rotten legal juggling that's going to take away those poor beggars' homes. The Morgan Gravel Company has literally blasted away dozens of laborers' homes, of foreigners mostly, in the last ten years, and now that they've come up against a few fighting Irish, the last stand on the Hill, they're going to daub over their proceedings with a coat of white-wash."
"Goldwash," Lowell corrected with a grin. "You seem to forget that these people are going to be paid for their property—whatever the judge decides is fair."
"His imagination may reach to one hundred. McLaughlin may prod him to one hundred and fifty."
"They'll take it."
"Of course they will, because Morgan will take the land out from under them whether they accept the money or not."
"They can appeal. There's always more law."
Roger Barton's shoulders hunched. His thick, dry, blond hair seemed to rise like an angry dog's. Without his moving, Anne felt that he had crossed the space between himself and the other. Her small hands clenched, and she nibbled her lower lip as she always did in moments of forced repression.
"Yes," Roger said quietly, "there is always the law, more law, for the rich, the crooked, the morally rotten. There is always the perversion of justice, the farce of an appeal, the hypocrisy of a judge, the pitiful sight of the 'twelve good men and true.' There is always more law to quibble and distort the truth."
"No doubt." The smile deepened at Roger's vehemence. "Only we lawyers don't usually express it so frankly."
"No, we don't. As long as we stay in the shameful business."
John Lowell's smile vanished. He looked at Roger with a sudden, new penetration, as if he had only just come to the realization of the seriousness of Roger's objection. After all, it might be well to temporize a little with this hectic young idealist. The firm needed Roger in many ways, and, in time, might need him more. With all this popular truckling to labor and democracy, this preposterous inversion of common sense and accepted order that seemed settling on the world, Lowell & Morrison might come to need a signpost in the murk.
John Lowell frowned thoughtfully. In the six months of Roger's connection with Lowell & Morrison, John Lowell had, more than once, admitted to old Morrison that Roger Barton had "principle-itis in an acute form." But as he had never seen, in the long course of his legal life, this disease withstand the treatment of personal success, he had kept his faith in Roger's final malleability—and many cases from Roger's knowledge. This Morgan matter had escaped his vigilance, and he was almost as angry with old Morrison as with Roger.
"Well," he finally conceded and rose to indicate the interview at an end. "I don't want you to do anything you don't believe in, Barton. I'll give the briefs to Daniels. You need have nothing to do with it."
"I never intended to have anything to do with it, nor with any other case from now on. I'm through."
For a moment John Lowell looked at the younger man with a look of hatred, scorn, and a shade of envy so faint that it was gone before Roger could be sure it had been. Then he shrugged his acceptance.
"That, of course, is for you to decide. I would not want to try to influence you in either direction. If you feel there is a purer field for your talents, why, go to it. The law has existed for several thousands of years and will probably go on." With a cold smile that never touched his eyes, he turned to Anne.
"Miss Mitchell, could you take some letters right away? I must get them off before five."
But Anne was coming slowly across the room toward him, as if drawn against her consciousness. Now, at the direct address her face flushed to realization; she hesitated, and then completed the distance with so genuine an effort that Roger Barton felt her courage, and without knowing that he moved, took a step toward her, as if answering the call of her slight frailness for physical support.
"Do you really mean that those people are going to be maneuvered out of their homes? That the legal action is only a sham? That it's all settled before we begin?"
Always physical torture for Anne to assert her beliefs against opposition, the flush flamed to a brick-red burning, her eyes grew smaller, she looked hot and swollen. When Anne blushed like this she was ugly.
John Lowell moved impatiently.
"Really, Miss Mitchell, a law office is not a church. It is a business. Here is a big firm needing rock and gravel, easy to get and close to shipping facilities. Years ago, when the city was not much more than a village, a few people built some dilapidated shacks on Telegraph Hill. The Lord knows what they paid for the land, or whom they paid. Soon the growth of the city will force down these shacks. Morgan offers to buy them now, and unless you value them by the 'home and fireside, and baby's cradle' standard of every sentimental tenant, the price is a fairly just one. The people themselves, if not interfered with, will be glad to take what they can get. On the whole, they're a canny lot. They know that it's only a question of a short time before they'd have to go. A city growing like this has no room to waste so near its water-front in rotting cottages and little gardens. The place for small houses like those is in Ocean View, or the Portrero, or the Mission outskirts."
"But it would take the men hours to get to their work from those places and"—Anne shivered—"they're so dismal and bleak. Gray hills, and wind and dust. The Hill has the Bay and the islands and the ferryboats at night."
John Lowell stared in astonishment and then laughed.
"Really, Miss Mitchell, you alarm me. I'm afraid you'll be turning my dictation into poetry, and sending out letters in blank verse."
The laugh cut Anne's last grip from the hope that John Lowell had not really meant what he said. He was, then, deliberately doing this thing that he knew was wrong, for the money in it. He was going to tear away from these people perhaps the only external beauty their lives held. Safe in his own well-appointed home, with all the glory of Bay and hills spread out before him, he was going to condemn these to the gray, thick dust of the Portrero, the bleak and windswept hills, the dull, depressing streets of the Mission outskirts. All her life Anne had lived on such a street and hated it with the whole force of her nature.
He had the power to do this thing and he was going to do it. Under the suave kindliness of his slim, perfectly groomed figure, he was like an animal snapping at every morsel that came his way. The law suddenly appeared to Anne as a trick surface upon which one walked, ignorant of the complicated mechanism below.
Standing before John Lowell, not reaching above his elbow, she looked straight into the eyes smiling down at her with a new, appraising gleam.
"Well?" he said, "do you feel that you will be able to get them out in plain prose?"
Anne rose on her toes, because the look in the full, brown eyes above her forced her to throw her scorn straight into them.
"No. I shall not be able to get them out in prose—nor—in any other way—after to-night. I—I—sha'n't be taking any more at all."
"No?" he said softly, the look changing to a touch that passed hotly all over the surface of her body. "I'm extremely sorry."
"I—I—couldn't work here another day," Anne squeaked, furious at the ridiculous picture she must make, poised upon her toes, like a silly little bantam pecking in a rage.
"You needn't explain, Miss Mitchell, I understand—perfectly." And, without moving his eyes, Anne felt them now include Roger Barton. "I beg your pardon for suggesting it. Of course you couldn't—under the circumstances. I assure you—I understand."
"Oh," Anne gasped in a cracking whisper that reached only to John Lowell and deepened his touch-like look, "you are—rotten."
Then, feeling the tears rushing to her eyes, she dropped to her heels and walked back to her desk.
The telephone summoned John Lowell. Roger Barton hesitated as if he were coming to her, but she put a sheet of paper quickly into the machine and he left the room. The office routine closed over the incident.
From long practice Anne's fingers worked with accurate independence, but, beyond their flying movement, her brain tried to put in order the chaos of her thoughts. She had given up her job, the best job she had had in the five years of her working life. In another half hour she would go out of the office, never to return. She would go home and tell her people. Into the heat of her mood, this need to tell her people fell like a small, cold lump of lead. Something within herself would drive her to try to make them understand, and only one fact would emerge clearly to them—she had lost her job.
At five-thirty, Anne laid the last letter on John Lowell's desk. As she put on her things, she knew that he was aware of every motion without directly looking at her.
"Good night, Mr. Lowell."
"Good night, Miss Mitchell." He looked up. Anne was the best stenographer he had ever had. In her close-fitting blue tailor suit, with a small blue velvet toque framing the wonderful fairness of her skin, and the smooth, cool gold of her hair, she was exceedingly pretty—prettier than John Lowell had ever noticed. With Roger Barton out of the way——
"If you reconsider your decision by morning, I won't remember it," he said with a smile that she alone among his stenographers had escaped so long.
"I shall not reconsider, Mr. Lowell." Anne spoke with a stiff primness that instantly dispelled his new interest.
"Very well. Your check will be sent you at the end of the week, as usual."
"This is only Wednesday."
"That's all right. You've often given overtime."
"Until Wednesday, if you please," Anne said quietly and wanted to cry. Four days would mean nothing to John Lowell; much to her.
"Very well." He picked up his pen and Anne went out.
She heard Roger Barton's voice as she passed his door and hurried on to the elevator. Down in the street, the home-going crowds flowed by. Anne's eyes filled with tears and she nibbled her lip to keep them back. Then she joined the northward current and walked quickly away.