OLD LETTERS
Theweek before Terence O'Brien's trial Watts had gone for one of his rare visits to Eleanor Ledyard's home in its low valley of the Ramapos. He found Pudge's home a tangle of lovely flowers, rich in smears of gaudy color, and the long waves of canterbury bells bowed to him in many tints as he paused at the white gate. Pudge, himself, ran down the paved garden path, a small turtle in one hand, a little willow whistle in the other. Both of these were proudly exhibited to his friend; also, mysterious news, the guinea pigs had now several little guinea pigs of their own and the doings of these piebald sacks of fur and ears were rehearsed. Watts listened with interest.
"Mother's up in the garret," said Pudge. "She's looking at letters—they make her cry."
Watts frowned. "They do, do they?"
"Yes, some more," the little fellow heaved a great sigh and took hold of Watts' trouser leg. "I'm glad you've come; when you come Mother doesn't cry as much; sometimes she looks in the glass and smiles."
"H'm," said the lawyer. "I say, Pudge, do you ever look in the glass?"
Pudge nodded. "When I'm playing Jack the GiantKiller, first I'm Jack and then I look in the glass; and then I'm the two-headed giant and then I look in the glass and try to see two heads on me."
Watts was interested. "A great game," he agreed. "Now suppose you shin up my leg as far as my vest pocket and see what's in it."
Pudge immediately essayed the shin, his little fat form clinging and groping. The vest pocket and its candy trove having been achieved, his friend put him on a shoulder and galloped around the garden with him.
"I'm sailing," crowed Pudge with delight, "I'm flying through the air, I'm a pigeon." The little hands ran into Watts' neck. "I like fathers," said Pudge with satisfaction.
"What!" gasped the lawyer. They paused by the water barrel and Watts, looking in the smooth surface, saw himself with the little face looking over his head.
"I like fathers," repeated Pudge; "they come and play with you like this. Greddy Martin's father, he comes and plays with him like this."
"But, old scout, I'm not your father." Watts looked at himself in the rain barrel, and a thought came to him. Guiltily he peered to see if it was in his face.
"Oh, my father's dead," said little Pudge, practically. "But you are something like Greddy's father, and so I don't care."
The rain barrel image wavered a little; the lawyer chuckled slightly. "Huh!" he growled, "I'm not afather, I am a camel. I'm carrying you on my back across the Algerian desert. Do you know what that is, Pudge?"
"Yes," said Pudge, "we have it for dinner."
"Well," smiled the "Camel," "I've carried you all across the Algerian desert and this rain barrel is an oasis where you stop and pick a date off this little peach tree." The two gravely picked imaginary dates and drank out of the spring. "But you must be careful when I drink out of the spring not to fall off my back into the rain barrel." The camel pretended to drink from the oasis rain barrel with dramatic effects of allowing the small rider to fall into it, and only by a miracle as it seemed did Pudge escape that awful fate.
The little boy, his eyes shining, looked into his friend's face. "Oh! we're having fun," he cried, "fun like other boys with their fathers. I wish you'd come every day! I like you."
"Supposing," said Watts, "I was to pitch my tent just outside your gate here, would Mother let me stay?"
Pudge deliberated. "She might, perhaps. I could ask her," and hopefully, "Maybe she wouldn't say no; maybe she would say, 'We'll see.'"
Watts smiled to himself. "How about food; my black horse and Friar Tuck, my big dog, would you bring us things to eat every morning?"
Now Pudge was slightly taken back. "You could have half my breakfast," he promised as man to man, "and one graham cracker," but the thing grew topresent difficulties to Pudge; "and one baked apple on Sundays," he faltered slowly.
"Nothing more?" The man standing there squeezed the fat legs hungrily. "Why," said Watts, "you'd surely let me have a little milk"; this camel was becoming a responsibility.
Now the desert rider hedged a little. "Well, you see," urged Pudge, "Mother wants me to drink all my milk; you see," he explained, "the more good milk I drink the more good boy I am."
"Sure." Watts slid him down to terra firma. "Well, I guess we can fix it up some way. Now about this mother of yours; let's stand down here and call up all sorts of nice names to her and see which one she'll answer, which one will make her come down to us."
Together they stood, the tall man with the dark dappled hair and the little shaver in blue linen, shouting such names as occurred to them up to the little garret window.
"Lady of Shalot," called Watts; he cast an eye about the sweet summer garden at a seat under a big horse-chestnut, "Lady of Shalot, come down and speak to Pudge's Camel."
"Oh, Mrs. Pudge's mother," sang out the little fellow, "come down and see my Watts Shipman."
"Blessed Damosel," Watts liked this game; his voice held something whimsically tender.
"Dearest Honey-bug," this with a masculine swagger from Pudge. But there was silence; no one appeared at the little window. Could the lawyer haveknown it Eleanor Ledyard had stopped reading the letters; an instinctive feminine hand went to her hair, then a curious look of restlessness came to her face; she did not, however, go at once to the window, though the calling voice of her little son drew her away from the trunk full of letters.
"That doesn't bring her." Watts' voice, purposely raised, held the note of injury. "Why, I don't believe she wants to see us," the lawyer spoke distinctly. "I think she knows I've come around with my tiresome questions. I say, Pudge, you know some people don't care for me the way you do."
"But Mother does," came the little voice eagerly. "She has your picture and she tells me long stories about——" A hand must have gone over Pudge's mouth. Up-stairs listening, Eleanor Ledyard felt the slow color burn in her face.
"Darling," she whispered softly—"you mustn't." Pudge's mother quailed.
Watts, holding the little fat hand, squeezed it; he looked up at the window steadily and something mounted in his throat. He felt the desolate sense of that trunk full of letters, of the woman patiently trying to read and destroy and—forget. "Our names don't seem to mean anything to that mother of yours. Let's try others, let's call her—well—just the dearest ones we know."
"I have," said Pudge stoutly. "Mrs. Honey-bug is my dearest; I haven't any more dear names."
"Well, I have," said the lawyer decidedly. "I haven't used up mine, not all the dearest ones I couldthink of, only if I called up some," Watts was eyeing the window, "your mother might scold me."
Pudge looked serious, then he clasped anew the hand that held his.
"I don't believe she would," encouragingly; "you try it."
As they stood thus hand in hand, Watts, knowing that every word was heard, essayed his mischievous worst.
"Dear Know-not-thine-own-heart," he called, "Lady of Denial"—"Heart's Sorrow."
Her head, shining with its coils of brown hair, appeared at the little oriel opening. Eleanor Ledyard smiled down her reproof. "Watts, how am I to keep at this thing which you know I must do if you two don't go away and amuse yourselves quietly; have I two children instead of one?"
"I wish you had——" murmured the man. He let something come into his eyes that Eleanor had often seen there; the deep blue eyes with the black lashes tried to meet this with womanly severity. Somehow this morning the look failed. Watts Shipman had come far to see a fair woman, and a spark of the tradition of the cavaliers and men of romance was in his blood. A lady at an oriel window was a person who must ultimately do one thing. Come down! The lawyer, his head bared, looked belligerently back, and something in his gaze had made Eleanor turn from the window quickly.
"I guess my mother is coming down," said little Pudge.
"She'd better," said Watts grimly, "or I'd have had to go and get her."
"But you couldn't," said Pudge earnestly, "not if she didn't want you to." Watts turned and looked at the small, earnest face.
"Dear lamb, I know that," groaned the man. "I know that; don't rub it in."
He called up to the empty window. "I say, Eleanor, please bring that letter stuff down and read it here; if you've got to do the deadly thing, let me help!"
So the morning ended by her coming down, and they sat very contentedly with Pudge making paper dolls out of the envelopes his mother gave him. Eleanor, with a sort of desperate haste, tore packet after packet of letters. All those relating to her husband's early life she had said she would set aside, "something for Pudge to have." Others she tore up so vehemently, into such small pieces, that the lawyer, a mere man, wondered, and little Pudge, carrying baskets of fragments to the trash-box, thought how much Hop-o'-My-Thumb would have liked these paper fragments for his trail back to his mother. That the fragments were in reality part of the trail of a weak man, father to her sturdy little boy, made a drift like falling snow in Eleanor's heart. One letter she had saved to show to Watts, and as the lawyer read it his eyebrows went up.
When at last Shipman put down the closely written sheets he bent his deep gaze on her.
"Well, that does look as if——" he turned questioningly. "You surely don't believe Ledyard is alive," incredulously, "Martin Ledyard, the great scientific adventurer, alive and the world not know it!"
Eleanor nodded. "I've always believed it." Her eyes wandered to the bloomy-purple of the line of mountains back of them. "Of course, I never could understand why, if he was anywhere in the world, why, when that happened he didn't come to us, to George and me. And after George went, I wondered more but I've always felt him alive, in the world, somewhere."
Watts was thoughtful. "He might have been afraid; he might have thought it would hurt him some way, do you think that?"
"No," the woman lifted her head decidedly. "That's not a Ledyard trait. Martin was as devoted to George as I—almost——" She shivered a little on the word and the lawyer sadly watching her realized that that word "almost" regulated the great gulf between the deep faith of a man's loving, and the shattering blasts of a woman's power of sorrow. Eleanor was silent a moment; then she said dreamily, "They adored each other at college, camping, on expeditions, everywhere. Martin might have been crushed by George's trouble, saddened beyond words, but he wouldn't have deserted; he would have come to us if he could have!"
"But," the lawyer turned to the letter in his hand, "this chap says that nearly all of the men in that West African expedition died of smallpox. I remember that year; it was fearful along the Niger; there was a lot of red tape and the Entente governments fought over whose job it was to stamp the thing out. It swept the Congo, I know. They all died, this chap Morrow says."
Eleanor Ledyard assented. "Nearly all, but they never accounted for all. Tarrant, the man Martin loved so, went first; and after that McCall, their surgeon; very bravely, I believe. Then the Southerner who partly financed the thing, did you read that awful part where they had to send them down the Niger in the canoes made of hollowed out trees? Well, they and the natives say that six canoes came down and that they burned all the smallpox victims in quick-lime. But, you see, there was one letter from Martin himself, very distressed, out of West Africa, at Monrovia, I think, as he waited to embark for England, and he says—this letter, dated long after, sounds pretty nearly out of his head—'they are all gone but me, and I was taken from the same canoe as Tarrant. I was trying to paddle him down to a village for burial; he had been dead four days when we got there, a putrid corpse! Tarrant, my friend, my beloved brother-in-science.'"
For a long time there was silence. The man and woman sat staring at the blue Ramapo as the strange scenes of the stricken men in the tropical river drifted through their minds. At last Eleanor spoke: "And then came 'George's Trial.'" Watts saw the terrible effort it was to her to say the words, how she glanced at Pudge at her feet, and then, "George wentand Martin never came to me. Nobody came to me."
Watts sat there, the letter in his hand. "I came to you," he said simply. She flashed him a look of passionate gratitude.
"As Christ might have," she said with equal simplicity.
The lawyer, half irritably, turned away. "I wish you'd drop that Christ idea," he muttered. "I'm a man, I'm not a god. I am a man, and I want a dear woman who doesn't want me."
She looked at him; her hands went out, her eyes soft, pleading. "Watts, dear, I am always ready to come from gratitude; indeed, dear friend, I would come trustingly ... in memory of what you did."
"No," he said firmly, "I want love, I don't want your trust and gratitude, not even your dear hands and lips." His soul leaped into his eyes, and he faced her implacably. "I want the thing I don't believe George got, but which you won't let me have. I want you. Your whole being,you, Eleanor."
She sat there like a person stunned. The thing that he had said went to some hidden place in her and pulled aside a temple curtain; for a moment her eyes flashed, outrage stiffened her form; then with a dignity the man could not fathom, the woman who had been a wife looked at him.
"I think," she said gently, "that you could not have meant to say that, that you have forgotten yourself."
It was the veiled woman of ice. Watts knew her well. The man got up, paced back and forth, his passionate heart pounding. Then he stood before her. "I'm sorry," he said, "order me out of here if you want to; I know I'm a cad." Watts, the self-controlled man of the world, felt his lips tremble. "Order me out," he blurted clumsily. "I'm—I'm——"
But she looked up, smiling gravely, and took his hand. "Sit down, Watts dear, don't be impatient and try," her dark blue eyes filled with tears, "try to understand."
"I do," said the man miserably, "I do understand. I'm a hound, Eleanor."
With a sigh the lawyer turned back to the letter. "There ought to be a search for Martin," he said thoughtfully. "What clues have you? Did he wear any one ring or anything; was there any peculiarity about him, scars or blemishes? Have you a photo of him?"
Eleanor could remember a very slight defect, a front tooth slightly broken. "He had fine teeth," she said, "and that break was teasingly noticeable." George Ledyard's widow took from the chain about her neck a rather large old-fashioned locket which she drew up from beneath her lace collar and silently she handed the thing to him. Its slight warmth came to the man's fingers in a way that made him glance suddenly at her, wondering at the calm, unconscious face. Keeping his thoughts down as best he might, Shipman opened the side opposite from the reckless face of George Ledyard, that face he had seen go through, atthe trial, every swift change of the reckless speculator and desperate trapped man; he glanced for an instant upon the lips that Ledyard's own wife had said, "Lured one until one was wrecked upon them." "With such a face," thought Watts bitterly, "a man can beckon a woman down to hell or up to heaven." Watts dared not look again at the wife drooping there, her little boy's head against her knee. He turned to the other side of the locket. Something, as he looked, rose like a finger post in his heart; it pointed to a set of conditions, a tangled net of human things he had recently known; but the lawyer did not instantly recognize it, only slowly came the gradual shaping of curious mists, and these settled in his mind like fog settling around the tops of houses.
The other face was younger than George's, finer and firmer, singularly a tempered man's face, free from recklessness, but with the look of adventure and an illumined look of pure kindness and intelligence, very unusual in a face so dominant and assured. The eyes, a little wide apart, were set under brows of resolution; the build of chin and cheek were of a spare sobriety; the lips, mobile and gracious, were a scholar's lips.
"Do you suppose he's gray now, if he's alive? Same hair as George's? No?"
Eleanor shook her head. "I don't believe hair like that can change, the curious red chestnut; we used to think that the birds and animals he tamed so easily came to him because he had that crest, a fine glittering plumage like their own."
"He must have seen strange birds in West Africa," Watts said dreamily, "strange men and things." The lawyer looked at her. "He might have gone crazy," he said suddenly. "He may be shut up somewhere; have you thought of that? The man's rotten cowardly, else why should he have left you to face this alone?"
Her eyes, deep and misty, looked at him. "He loved George," she said quietly; "he would have come if he could have; he loved George. Even you," she looked at him a little childishly, "never did that."
Watts smiled at the feminine pettishness.
"No," he said gravely, "I just loved George's wife, and I do still, God help me!"
She half rose; but his look held her. "I hoped not," she said almost defiantly. "I hoped that that girl might have——"
Watts, however, steadily met her glance. "Sard Bogart," he said, "is, well, she's——" he broke off, looking earnestly at his friend. "That girl is going to need friends," said the lawyer decidedly. He handed the locket back to Eleanor, and with a curious look, half awe, half ache, saw it slip into its place. He stopped, something trivial on his lips. He was glad at Eleanor's next remark.
"I wish I might help her." Her voice was calm, sympathetic.
The lawyer was a little dubious, a little uncertain. "I don't know; I've told her about you," he hesitated. Eleanor half shrank and Watts added coolly, "That you are my dearest friend." He stood upthoughtfully. "Unless you are going to ask me to lunch, I must go. Are you going to ask me to lunch?" he asked her.
The old drama began instantly between them. The masterful, pursuing man and the retreating, doubting woman. The thing itself took hold of them, but resolutely, like people tempered to the grave concerns of life, they put it aside.
Eleanor shook her head. "I am not going to ask you," she said gently.
"Punishment, I suppose," murmured Watts.
There was a moment's silence. She also rose and he thought that in her white gown with the rows of blue larkspur and the canterbury bells as background she was a wondrous fair thing that had almost too much power over him. The man's mind flew to the bright impulse of the girl they spoke of. Eleanor saw this and her hand went out to his. "Bring Sard to see me," she said it very kindly, "and that funny little Cousin Minga. I used to see a good deal of the 'Mede and the Persian'; they are dears." She looked at him, casting about for something that should give him comfort. "Next week you take up the O'Brien case, don't you? Tell me, has the boy any chance? Can you save him? Is it to be for life?"
Watts turned; he looked long and silently at the sun descending, at all the colors and life of the flowers about them, at the mountains standing like great blocks of sapphire beyond the green fields awash with daisies. Suddenly, he pointed to a little cedar tree reaching its infant head close by their side.
"How long do you think that little thing has been there?"
Mrs. Ledyard thought about two years. "It's so cunning; it's planted itself. I haven't had the heart to have it taken out."
"When it is a big tree," said Shipman slowly, "and when his bones are brittle and when only images of sin and failure and disease are graven on his soul, Terence O'Brien will be called 'free.'"
"Free," she murmured; her eyes, fixed on her friend's, read anew that greatest and deepest thing in him, the passion for humanity.
She saw him fighting for a boy as she had seen him fight for her own husband; saw his stern face and iron gray head raised in its superb appeal to the pity and understanding of the so-called "good" who control the so-called "bad." Something surged up in the woman, a deep something that was a triumph and a shame. "I could make this man happy," her soul said. "I could make him happy!" Then into the strange quietude of a wife's memory, she withdrew even as she gave him her hand and eyes. She was a cold statue, a gracious being, a woman who had known.
Pudge ran up. "Mother," the little blue figure shouted, "I've caught a butterfly. He wiggles his wings; he doesn't like it; he wants to get away."
The man and woman smiled. They showed Pudge the meaning of wings, the reason things want to get away and in showing, they were tender of each other. When the little orange and black fans again waveredagainst the great wall, the blue vast of the morning sky, Pudge himself got the sense of your true liberator!
"My, I like to let him go!" he breathed. He gazed a little wistfully after his silken-fanned treasure, insisting stoutly, "I like to let him go!" Pudge looked earnestly up into the two faces, smiling at him. "I want everything to go free," said Pudge, "except guinea pigs!"
Watts waited a moment; then he took Eleanor's hand in both of his. He waited until she lifted her eyes to him. "I shall not come again," he said very gently, "until—you send for me."
She was silent. "If I am ever to come," said the man, "send me only the message that you need me."
He turned and was gone.
EXPLOSIVE DUST
Everyplace has its own peculiar odor, from the flower and candle-smoke scent of a graceful woman's sitting-room to the tarry ropes and fish-net and canvas sails of a boat-house; from the dried earth, rustling bulb and flower-seed smell of a tool bin to the paint tubes and mustiness of old draperies and cigarette smoke of an atelier. Sunning mattresses, hot milk bottles, warming squares and talcum powders, the delicious smell of bathed baby flesh; scent of wooden pews and velvet cushions, camphored furs and stale incense of a church: every department of life, every living thing, has its haunting, significant odor.
A country court-room smells of unaired dust, of wet umbrellas and muddy rubbers, of onlookers who have handled horses and gasoline, of doctors who have come from operations. Smells of the coarse perfumes of the criminal's lady friends, the bay rum of the shining country lawyer, lemon peel and cloves chewed by such persons as even in the most stringent times of the Volstead Act appear always to have something to conceal.
When the man-of-straw of outraged community virtue is dislodged the court-room is redolent of prejudice and policy and pedantry and plausibility; ofmany things that lie on each other in layers like morning griddle cakes. But it seldom suggests atmosphere of health and light and true cleanliness and earnest religious progressiveness; of the earnest desire to administer true justice, of the earnest wish to analyze specific examples of crime, to conserve all goodness, to see straighter, more freely, with greater charity and more modern scientific accuracy. Of these things few court-rooms smell.
It may have been the stale, dreary, intrenched and pompous atmosphere of the Trout County court-room that finally drove the Minga Bunch from their original intention of following Terence O'Brien to the last ditch of his trial. Youthful enthusiasm and curiosity had long since died out, leaving only a grudging sense of clan obligation, and the long hours of reviewing circumstantial evidence, the cross-questioning of this and that dull witness, the peering faces of the family of the murdered man and the grim and relentless attitude of the jury, these things had somehow robbed the circumstances of all their dramatic values. The sight of Terry standing day after day in the pen, his tow-colored hair always brushed the same way, his eyes always nervously blinking the same way, and his dry mouth unable to testify in his own defense, nettled the group of young people who had interested themselves in his behalf. They had supposed the young accused would rise suddenly and pelt the people with polemics. They had looked for dynamics; they found only musty, fusty technique, sour looks of old men, rigidities of convention and a bewilderedeffect of vital issues lost in a grand tea-party of form and precedent.
Also, Watts Shipman disappointed them. Not experienced enough to comprehend the poise and power that lay behind Shipman's calm, his deferential giving way to his "distinguished opponent," his punctilious observance of every known courtesy and tradition of the bar, they found him tepid and unconvincing. They saw their great man as rather a simple soul, apparently a negligible factor in the trial, apparently dominated by the sleek, shining country counsel for the prosecution, and did not know that those very simplicities were the earnest of his greatness. The Bunch did not know the modern function of the lawyer to hold himself rigidly from emphasis until all of the case has been digested. To work out by the slow sifting of evidence the four sides of his construction, the meticulous dotting ofI'sand crossing ofT's, the subterfuge of the trained, technical response of witness when asked certain specific questions; in short, the suave chicanery and subtle craft that has been slowly built up around the narrowing arena where two brains tourney for the life or honor of a prisoner—these things were so much mortification of the flesh for the restive "Bunch."
One by one the slow summer mornings of the trial dragged out. One by one the "Bunch" dwindled down. Dora, trim in costume, desperate in eyes and manner, might have noticed this defection; Sard, rather listless and weary, saw it with scorn; Shipman, a slight glimmer in his eyes, observed it. But Mingaand Dunstan, coming religiously together every day, both noted and registered it.
These two young people sat solemnly aloof in some communion of spirit, waiting for some revelation, what, they hardly knew. But to an imaginative onlooker they might have seemed slowly in their young hope to dim; their vaulting belief might have appeared to such an onlooker to become slowly filmed over by the long, long dust and dinginess, the hanging cobwebs, the old parchments and papers, the pomps and vanities, the emptiness and scaly dead skin of the Law.
But Dust is capable of explosion, and the two youngsters solemnly sitting there on the last day of the case gradually felt themselves slow fuses in some strange emotional bomb of their own planning. This was somewhat heightened by a note that Dunstan carried in his pocket. Once during the trial the lad took this out and showed it to his companion; the two heads bent over it, two brown hands clasped in solemn vow. Two solemn pairs of young eyes swore some consecration to a so far half-planned venture.
Minga seemed restless and scornful. She kept her eyes on the proceedings with the air of one who should say, "And this is what you call 'justice'!"
At last came the summing up for the defense, and the great lawyer rose and made his plea for the youth, who, sullen of eyes and unbelieving of spirit, sat there. The court-room was full. Watts' fame had been passed from mouth to mouth among the Trout County inhabitants and all up and down the littlevillages of the Hudson the lawyer's mission had been told. Private automobiles bumped along the country roads, jitneys from the ferries and from other counties deposited their loads of citizens. The country people, secure in their sense of collective virtue, untroubled with modern analyses of crime and punishment, unhampered with any passion for an adjustment of punishment to environment and education, and keen for the Roman Holiday, came to see severe sentence of imprisonment passed upon one who had forfeited his right to live among them. The jury, clean as to shave, ostentatious as to watch chain, some perfumed, some begoggled, one in hip boots, another in pearl spats, all with an expression of wisdom and virtue rather droll to anyone who knew the hidden chapters of their separate lives; in fact, the Spoon River Anthology, numbering twelve picked verses, filed into the jury box, and "twelve good men and true" mopped their foreheads and tried to look unconscious.
Outside, the summer morning was rich with promise. Butterflies sailed two and two past the branches and down into the deep grass. The leaves, turning over like little green babies on their backs, warmed their little stomachs in the sun.
The summing up was short. Terry, his half-formed young ears pricking up, heard it, only half understanding. Sard, Dunstan and Minga heard it rebelliously. Dora, like a person in a trance, heard it stonily.
The criminal had done murder, so the evidence had shown, to obtain money for adventure and to furtherschemes for his advancement. No motive of personal hatred or self-defense or vengeance could be found. The testimony had been full, accurate and to the point. Terry's curly, well-brushed head was on his chest. Later it was raised and the boy was staring defiantly around him like a young bull at bay and desperately knowing only one thing, how joyous, how magnificent it would be to charge!
Sard, sitting back in the court-room, looked from the boy, all the muscles of his young back taut, to her father. It was to her suddenly as if the whole court-room, all of them were, under the Judge's power of punishment, and that somehow his whole life, all the whetted flavor of his existence was to mete punishment. To the girl's daunted eyes, her father was as powerful here as he was at the breakfast table. The gray head was pompous and rawly defined against the background of the American flag; the hard-boiled eyes looked with a peculiar fixity, a muscular invariability on every witness; the nasal voice with its few comments, swift interruption and rebuke, its lifeless adjustments and refereeship of the proceedings were of an inflexible quality that the girl felt was not of convention but of a hard, unimaginative, self-secure and characteristic conceit.
So that when the counsel for the defense rose, three young hearts in the assemblage arose with him. Yet to their passionate wish, Watts seemed, standing in the court-room here, to fall short. The distinguished figure, the face tanned with a summer of outdoor work and horseback riding, sobered with long, lonelyvigils of thought, had, it seemed, great respect for this country court-room, for its judiciary, for the foreman of the jury and for his opponent in the matter of the trial. Watts carried himself like a man who had been impressed by the firmness and sobriety of the proceedings. The lawyer let the court-room know that he had had many personal talks with the prisoner. It was his skilful way of assuring them that they shared his passion for reforms.
Terry's head lifted, looking at him curiously. The young fellow remembered revelations, tears, of one night in particular when Watts had stayed with him until dawn came and his hysteria was over. The boy wondered what his friend would reveal of this. But the great lawyer went calmly on with unemotional emphasis to state that he had found the criminal's mind vague, perhaps not properly educated, unformed and in ignorance of the many physical facts that at his age induce crime.
"And we know," remarked the speaker calmly, "that there is an age in young manhood when a youth is hardly responsible. The law, I feel, should invariably in its adjustments reckon with the physiological fact of that age. He had," he said, "talked with the prisoner as he would have liked to be given the wisdom at crises to talk to a son of his own, and as"—here the man looked about the court-room into the rows of dull and complacent faces—"it seems to me it is absolutely incumbent on all of us to talk to sons and daughters of our own frankly, giving them truth and the clear analysis of all that makes in ourbodies and environment and heritage for crime; for sins against ourselves and the body politic."
The lawyer then reviewed some mitigating circumstances, touched lightly on some of the more interesting technical aspects of the case and addressed the jury on behalf of the commutation of the sentence. Finally, with curious simple tenderness, a thing that the court-room did not understand, at which Judge Bogart looked displeased and drummed impatiently with his fingers, at which the country lawyers openly squirmed and yawned, but at which Dora sat tense and straight, and Terry's young head went down into his arms, he finished.
"If, Gentlemen of the Jury, you should still feel that you must bring in the verdict of intentional and deliberate guilt, then I appeal, your Honor, for the commutation of sentence. I appeal in the name of Humanity, of struggling, sinning, ignorant Humanity, and by that new spirit which makes us disbelieve nowadays in the 'pound of flesh.' I appeal, your Honor, by my own youth's ignorance, its mistakes and struggles and by the ignorances and mistakes and struggles of those I have tried to help; by yours, Gentlemen of the Jury, who take your solemn part in the decision after the trial. I appeal to Terence O'Brien, the accused, to take your decision, whatever it may be, and apply it as a test of his own character and what he may still make of that character; and I appeal to his sister, sitting there, to make her grief and sorrow noble, a test by which she may grow stronger and braver.
"I appeal," said Watts, looking down toward his three young friends who sat with hot cheeks watching him, "to all intelligence and sweetness and honesty of women, all strength and cleanness and courage of men to help Terence O'Brien and all such as he. I ask, your Honor, that his sentence may be mitigated, so that he may finally go back to a world acknowledged the better by his punishment, and be received by the world with respect and helpfulness. I ask these things," said the lawyer in a low voice, "as I know my own human soul and its potentialities, as I know yours, sir," turning to the prosecutor, "as I know yours, gentlemen," turning to the somewhat confused jury, "and as I know yours," with a half smile at the unimaginative audience eyeing him.
"For we are all somewhere, sometime, through some guilt or ignorance or weakness and mistake, guilty of punishable things. That is why we must forever demand of our Law that it shall be administrated with hope, must forever inculcate and advocate the higher, healthier judgments of analysis, understanding, temperance and mercy. There is no glory in punishing predestined guilt; there is glory in shielding and protecting potential criminals from guilt."
The speech fell painfully flat, as Watts must have known it would. It left the court-room cold. These country people, trained to the less analytical, more emotional attitude toward crime and punishment, felt somehow defrauded. The great lawyer had robbed them of their Roman Holiday, of the raging and tearing oratory to which by his very greatness they feltthey were entitled. There is an unconquerable love among the half-baked for flourishes and figures, for verbal fireworks and Mosaic utterances. No country audience feels that it has been fairly dealt with in a criminal trial unless it has been seized roughly by the orator and dragged willingly over the entire gamut of the prisoner's shame, contrition, despair, rage, vindictiveness, and given a delicious peep at the unspeakable and the unprintable.
The rest was technical. The judge dryly charged the jury, commending, coldly, a consideration for the youth of the prisoner. The jury filed out; the crowd filtered forth.
Minga and Dunstan leaped from their seats and fled forth under the trees. Minga's small face was pale. She stood staring unseeingly at the crowds straggling out of the little country court-house of Trout County.
People were already settling down with lunch boxes or hurrying away to eat before the jury should return. It was prophesied from mouth to mouth that the jury would not be "out" long. Groups standing about discussed the case with relish. The comments were bald, stereotyped and pharisaical. The tiresome, assumed impeccability of this crowd discussing one boy's misdoings got on Minga's nerves. Who were these people, some of them mean of face, too evidently underhand, tricky and foul-mouthed, to condemn a boy, only twenty, who had had them for example and no mature chance to estimate the essential stuff of life?
The girl, with unreasoning resentment and littleunderstanding of the enormous values of the collective sense of equity, watched Judge Bogart with slow pomp, making formal gestures of greeting and dismissal. She saw the two lawyers exchanging deprecating amenities, and wanted to laugh. What a play it all was! What mummery!
She watched Sard talking to Shipman and her heart was hot with rage as the two exchanged what seemed to her inadequate remarks.
"How's Winged Victory?"
Sard's hands went eagerly out.
"I'm still thinking of your speech. It's what I've always wanted to say—to have said."
"You didn't exact more pyrotechnics!" He met her glance quizzically.
"Ah," the girl breathed, "you spoke to their intelligences, not to their emotions. You made people think!"
"Did I?" Smiling doubtfully.
"Oh, it must do some good!" she insisted. "It must influence them some way or other, if not for Terry"—the young, hopeful face clouded, "then for someone else. Colter says——" The girl hesitated then went on quickly, "You made them use their minds, you showed the relation of society to crime; they saw that they were guilty of the Terrys of this world!"
Lovely in her enthusiasm she added, "I was watching. Old Mr. Fetherfew wiped his eyes and the garage man coughed, and that young drug clerk looked so curious and interested. More young people lookedinterested than old ones," said Sard rather acutely. "I think that some of them really understood what you meant."
"You're too encouraging." Watts, smiling, stood with one foot on the runner of her car. He was noting the traces of worry on the girl's face. His good news, that he believed the jury would bring in a modified verdict and Terry's sentence would not necessarily be for life, had not changed this look of worry. He had seen Sard hesitate and flush consciously after that arrested "Colter says."
Shipman had had his mind upon this girl and her problem ever since the club dance. So Sard's little world had already "made her ashamed." It had, with its tawdry assumption, already begun to pass judgment upon her. These were the things that sent young people running amuck. What chance was there in a community like this for the fine idealisms of youth? Shipman thought. How much more stringent and vindictive are the unwritten laws of so-called society against the bold spirit that seeks to transcend it than the concise preventive inhibitions of the state statute.
Watts had heard rumors of the Tawny Troop canard and of the general village interpretation of Colter's presence in this girl's vicinity. How commonplace, how vulgar it was; how it could hurt her!
The seasoned man winced at the thought of that pure spirit smirched with the stupid and bestial mouthings of the ordinary community. He shrank to think of his Winged Victory before the essential squalidness of the minds with which she was surrounded. Buthe asked no questions, he only looked thoughtfully into the resolute fresh eyes, and there he seemed to read a page newly turned in Sard's heart.
This girl, he saw, was slowly growing conscious about the man, Colter. Jove, it was a pity! But with the buzzings of the country community and her father's cold isolation from the problem there could be only one result: she would grow more and more sure of this one personality whose cause she had espoused. That was the way her kind met what it had to meet. Watts thought of what things Sard might have to meet. His dark eyes tried to read hers. "Courage!" they said to her, and again, "Courage!"
"The Minga Group deserted, after all," the lawyer teased. "A little inharmony there, I'm afraid." Then, as he saw two young figures morosely eating sandwiches under the shade of an elm, he went forward.
"Well, worshipful clients——"
The lawyer was anxious to get Minga past all shyness and some painful memories. There was nothing in his face but the look of one who greets an old comrade.
"How am I to spend my ill-gotten gains?" The man asked it with purposeful lightness. "There's about three hundred dollars that you contributed; shall we give it to Dora?"
The two faces darkened. Minga threw away her sandwich. She turned and faced him, impudently looking him up and down. Her dark blue eyes glittered with a cold dislike that almost startled the man.He regarded her with puzzled concern, amazed at the variability of this little creature whom he had already seen under so many different phases of emotion. Now, Watts thought, Minga looked really dangerous; something was added to her usual rebelliousness.
"Oh," said the girl flippantly, "let's do something for Dora by all means, buy her a grand piano."
He did not answer. She went on bitterly: "That will makeyoumore comfortable anyway."
"I've disappointed you?" the man questioned gently. Then trying again for lightness, "I was not worthy of my hire."
"Ah," with quick dislike, "disappointed us? You've been treacherous to us."
He was quiet, waiting to hear what she had further to say.
"With your power," contemptuously, "with your prestige, to just talk, to sermonize and philosophize and make no appeal for him, for Terry. Oh," said the girl excitedly, "it was like going past a drowning person in a boat, telling all the while how to make the boat safer for all the safe people, letting the person drown——" She caught her breath with a sob.
Sard and Dunstan looked wonderingly on this sudden eloquence. It was not Minga's way to vibrate to the sorrow of the under-dog. Only Watts' shrewd brain guessed at the emotions that underlay the girl's present scorn. The trained eyes perceived what was the dynamo that augmented this passion. With something very tender in the gesture he tried to take Minga's hand but she swerved from him.
She did not, however, abandon the discussion, and Dunstan, his lace masked and suspicious, stood back of her. The youth scowled as Shipman asked slowly, "If you had what you call my power, just what would you do? Open all the prisons and turn out all the criminals? Use it to protect one poor lad or to protect many lads and old men and women and children? Do you know that Terry's mind is psychologically the kind of mind that naturally resorts to violence to get what it wants?"
"But you have never believed that Terry would be pardoned or you might have gotten pardon, or a fine, or something," vaguely. "That was what we wanted. You never really tried!" the girl passionately insisted. "Nothing that you have said this morning but acknowledged that you believed him guilty. You didn't insist on his having another chance!"
The man standing there bareheaded, the lines strong on his kind face, his dark, white dappled head conspicuous under the low hanging elm branches, looked wonderingly at her, seeing the tears cloud her eyes. He longed, as he had longed before, to meet this defiant little spirit with a passion of tenderness, yet an old discipline controlled him. With his sober grasp of life he sought to help her.
"You mean," the lawyer said slowly, "that I have never believed him guiltless! No, I haven't; we all heard his guilt proved. You expected him to be freed because of his youth; you thought that possible. I never did. Child," said the man, "there is always punishment for wrong-doing; it is automatic. Whetherit comes of the courts or of life, it comes! Don't you realize that even a life-sentence might be merciful; a deterrent, to keep Terry from the worse crimes to which his inheritance and environment might lead him? Try to have patience!"
Shipman held out his hand; he tried to make her meet his eyes. He laid the power of his spirit on her. "You want better, more intelligent human laws, more enlightened justice," he said gravely; "so do I. But, do you know how best to get freedom and justice for all peoples——? By obeying such law as there is!"
Watts smiled at them, shaking his head. "Oh, I know it's a slow way, a tedious way, a tame way, but unless we all want to stay forever 'under the law' with all the slavery and lack of progress that connotes, we must be better disciplined, better educated and more intelligent people. We must stay 'under the law' until slowly and painfully and all together we shall come to a consciousness of more Christian and more intelligent laws to which we can all subscribe."
Minga drove her hands into her front pockets.
"I want justice," said the girl, crisply.
"So do I," was the lawyer's prompt reply. "I want it, but I seldom see it."
"I want the justice that would give Terry another chance."
"I want justice for the old cobbler whom Terry killed."
He considered her. "There's only just one way to keep the Terrys of the world out of jail."
She faced him, held by his magnetism, yet unbelieving. Watts dominated her as he had that night on the mountain. "Just by being better men and women ourselves. The criminal is the man or woman who analyzes and defies society, and in some cases his arraignment of society is just." Then, with a voice that thrilled with conviction, Shipman said to them:
"Never lose your passion for justice, for the under-dog; never cease hating smug, secure, complacent things, and never relax in your efforts to be more intelligent men and women. I am willing to grant you that there can be no essential justice in life as long as there is no proper understanding of Terry's temptations, his mental and bodily defects. To that extent we, as much as he, are to blame for his crime and we must never cease to agonize for him and for such as he. It is our duty to raise ourselves through education and our civilized dreams of justice to enact laws that shall protect all the Terrys from themselves, give them safety against their wayward impulses; understanding of the disease of their crime; until that time comes," finished Watts, "we are all under the law."
It was with a wistfulness the others could not understand that the man said these things. Manfully, he tried to curb this young despair while he gloried in and respected it. Some day Watts knew they would forget this noble passion. They, like him, would grow old, mature in worldly wisdom, willing to throw muchinto the terrible human discard, where so much youth, beauty, hope and honor die in order that the artificial fabric, called society, may be statically preserved!
Minga turned to Dunstan. "Then Terry," she said under her breath, "has no friends but us." The two looked at each other meaningly. They turned slowly toward their roadster. They sprang in; the long shape backed and snorted and left an angry trail of dust on the summer highway.