The Just And The Unjust (54 page)

'Thanks, I will,' said George. 'Well, good night. Good night, Marty.' He went down the steps and walked rapidly up Court Street.

Bunting said, looking at the moon, 'He's a nice kid. Going home?'

'Yes,' said Abner.

'See you in the morning. Better come down to the office.' Bunting continued to stand still. 'Don't take it to heart, Ab. We'll see what we can do with the rest of them.'

'I think we did what we could.'

Bunting said, 'And don't worry about next fall. I know how it feels. You wonder. You'll be O.K., Ab. You have plenty of what it takes — more than I have. Good night.'

'Good night,' Abner said.

5

Abner drove his car into the old stables. The cement floor on which he halted had been laid down more than twenty years ago when Judge Coates decided — an unusual step at the time — to keep two cars. To make room, some disused horse stalls were ripped out, and it was discovered then that the old floor was rotten. When the new cement floor was finished and the workmen gone for the day, Abner put his initials in the still-soft surface with a stick; and for good measure, impressed his bare footprints beside them; and for still better measure, impressed also the bare footprints of Caesar, an Airedale dog they then had.

Time had not obliterated those marks. By the glare of the headlights against the back wall, Abner could still see them, just to the left of the door of what had been the harness room. He remembered all that perfectly; taking off the rubber shoe he wore; and the cement cool and moist against the sole of his foot; and Caesar, years dead and forgotten, alive and struggling in consternation as Abner pressed down his paw. The exact object, if Abner had any beyond showing interest in a material that could be soft to-day, yet hard as stone to-morrow, was not clear — perhaps just this; that some day, years after, he might notice the marks and think with satisfaction that he had made them. Snapping off the headlights, Abner got out. He noticed and thought, just as the boy perhaps planned.

Closing the doors, he stood a moment in the broad moonlight looking at the big dark mound of the house. These things, he thought, remained — only for a while, of course; but longer, at any rate, than a man did.

His grandfather built the house, and for him it had been new and desirable; a show place, with its great ornamented bargeboards, its cavernous arched verandas and round shingled tower, in the Childerstown of dirt streets and gas lights in the 'eighties. The Judge, the Old Judge, would not have been surprised — what sentient man could be? — to find that the new became old; and the desirable, undesirable; and the house, once so fine-looking, grotesque. As an exercise in reason this was not hard; but how hard to grasp it, to know that the real to-day, the seen and felt to-day, and everything around you, and you, yourself as you stood thinking, would dissolve and pale to a figment of mind, existing, like the future you tried to think of, only in thought!

While Abner stood, the old courthouse clock struck twelve (his grandfather would have noticed that the new courthouse clock carried clearly out here). The faint deep bongs rose over the tree tops and the sleeping hill. Surprised to find that it was so late, Abner walked down the brick path.

Under the moonlit roof of the kitchen wing, in the shadow of the shining slates, a voice said suddenly, 'Who's that?'

Starting, Abner looked up. In the window of the bedroom where Lucius and Honey slept, the shape of a head a little darker than the darkness, and the shoulders of a dull white pyjama coat, showed. Abner said, 'All right, Lucius. Who do you think it is?'

'Mr. Abner? I hear that car. Then, nobody comes down. It might be burglars.'

'It's all right. Sorry if I woke you up.'

'You didn't wake me, Mr. Abner. I keep an eye on things around here. Judge laid up and you out, somebody's got to. You finish that trial?'

'Yes.'

'I guess it's curtains for those gangsters?'

'They'll get twenty years in jail, I think.'

There was a silence.

'They not going to electrocute them? They kill that man, and they not going to electrocute them?'

'The jury didn't seem to think they did kill him,' Abner said.

'Oh!' said Lucius. 'Well, I surely thought it was the chair for them! Well, I guess I'll tell Honey. She thought it was.'

'All right,' Abner said. 'Good night.'

'Good night.'

There was no light in the lower hall, but a dim glow fell on the head of the stairs, showing that the door of his father's room was open. Abner turned the night latch, found the first step with a practised foot, and went up quickly and steadily on tiptoe. He was expecting his father to call; but when no call came, he stepped faster, with a tremor of alarm, and stood in the bedroom door. His father rested propped up on pillows his eyes closed, the paralysed side of his big face hanging with forlorn helplessness. He breathed roughly, but calm and even; and Abner saw that he was only asleep.

Judge Coates stirred. His face worked a moment; his eyes opened. He brought up his good hand and laid the back of it against his paralysed cheek, as though to cover while he brought it under what control he could, a spectacle that he knew was distressing. 'Well, son,' he said with difficulty. 'Must have drowsed off! Late?'

'Just struck twelve, sir.'

'Jury trouble?'

'And plenty of it,' Abner said. 'Do you want to go to sleep?'

'No, I don't! Sit down! Sit down!' His voice gained clearness as the muscles limbered. 'Tell me about it. Verdict in? Smoke a cigarette.' He got one from between the piled books on the table. 'Sit down,' he said. 'Light it myself when I get ready.'

'Second degree murder,' Abner said, sitting down. 'Judge Irwin read the jury a lecture.'

'Against the evidence?'

'As square as anything could be. Vredenburgh was fit to be tied.'

'Harry make a good speech?'

'That's about the size of it,' Abner said. 'And plain contrariness. I think Marty may have taken it a little too much for granted —'

Abner broke off. The criticism had been just and judicious when he first formulated it to himself, sitting in chagrin at the Commonwealth's table. There was no disloyalty in the silent recognition of a mistake when Marty made one; and no complacency in noting, warned by the mistake, logical ways to avoid it. When he let himself voice the criticism to someone else, there was a little of both: disloyalty in criticizing when his only object must be the trifling but infamous one of trying to dissociate himself from the failure of an enterprise in which he had shared; complacency, for when he pointed out a mistake, he left it plain that it was not one he himself would have committed. 'I mean,' he said, 'Marty had the case cold. There couldn't be two answers to the facts. He more or less left it at that. Kinsolving, an F.B.I, witness we had, who may be a liar but he is certainly no fool, told me afterward that he thought the jury was jibbing at executing two men for something they argued a third man had really done.'

Judge Coates said, 'A jury has its uses. That's one of them. It's like a —' he paused. 'It's like a cylinder-head gasket. Between two things that don't give any, you have to have something that does give a little, something to seal the law to the facts. There isn't any known way to legislate with an allowance for right feeling.'

'Well, Vredenburgh told Harry this Court wasn't enforcing the Sixth Commandment.'

'From the bench?'

'Oh, no. Afterward, in the Attorneys' Room. I guess he thought the jury had given a little more than it needed to. He said he was disgusted with it.'

'He won't feel that way to-morrow. Tom's got better sense than that. In his time, he's had trouble with his temper.'

'What was that?'

'It was long ago,' Judge Coates said. 'When he was district attorney, he used to go off the handle now and then. He got over it. It isn't a matter of any interest now. Juries didn't always find what he thought they ought to in those days, either. Justice is an, inexact science. As a matter of fact, a judge is so greatly in a jury's debt, he shouldn't begrudge them the little things they help themselves to.'

'I don't follow,' Abner said.

'The ancient conflict between liberty and authority. The jury protects the Court. It's a question how long any system of courts could last in a free country if judges found the verdicts. It doesn't matter how wise and experienced the judges may be. Resentment would build up every time the findings didn't go with current notions or prejudices. Pretty soon half the community would want to lynch the judge. There's no focal point with a jury; the jury is the public itself. That's why a jury can say when a judge couldn't, "I don't care what the law is, that isn't right and I won't do it." It's the greatest prerogative of free men. They have to have a way of saying that and making it stand. They may be wrong, they may refuse to do the things they ought to do; but freedom just to be wise and good isn't any freedom. We pay a price for lay participation in the law; but it's a necessary expense.'

'You mean,' said Abner, 'that in order to show he's free, a man shouldn't obey the laws.'

'A free man always has been and always will be the one to decide what he'd better do,' Judge Coates said. 'Entrapment is perfectly legal. The law lets you arrange an opportunity for a suspected thief to steal so that you can catch him. I don't think right feeling can ever stoop to it. Compounding a felony is an indictable offence; but a man feels, just the same, that he has a right to forgive those who injure him, and no talk about his duty to society will change that feeling. In a case of larceny, it may be no defence in law that the party from whom the goods were stolen, himself stole them; but the feeling of the average man does in part defend it by saying it served him right to lose what didn't belong to him. It is held that drunkenness does not aggravate a common law offence any more than it excuses it.'

He shook his head. 'Depending on the circumstances, it may do either. Most people would feel that committing perjury drunk was not so bad as committing it cold sober; while committing an involuntary manslaughter drunk would be worse than committing it sober. Well, I'm rambling on. I don't know what makes old men like to talk so much. Maybe they're just talking to themselves, trying to find out what they think. I saw the
Examiner
about the Field thing. That's another case mixed up with what people feel. Judging by Maynard's editorial, I don't know that it makes for justice.'

'What it made for,' Abner said, 'was the Board giving Rawle a vote of confidence to-night. Maynard was pretty sore about it.'

Judge Coates reached over and took a cigarette lighter from the table. By pressing the top, he made a flame snap up and lit the cigarette.

'Where did you get that?' Abner said.

'Present. Matter of fact, if I have to smoke, I ought to use matches. I was getting pretty handy with them. Mosher is enthusiastic about these wretched little accomplishments. Yes. Cousin Mary gave it to me. She came in this morning.'

'What did she want?'

'That's right; she did,' Judge Coates said. 'She'd heard about the school board business, and she was worried about what was going to happen to Bonnie. I think she thought I might be able to take a hand in it. Of course, there was nothing I could do.'

'So you told her not to worry; if Rawle was kicked out and Bonnie lost her job, you'd get her another.'

'In substance, yes. When Cousin Mary worries, it shakes the house. You have to stop that at any cost. She has a hard time, really.'

'Well,' said Abner, 'I don't know whether it will make it any easier; but her daughter and I are getting married. Bonnie gave me some supper down there; and we thought we would. I suppose I ought to ask if you mind if we live here awhile.'

'When are you going to get married?'

'Some time this month, probably. There are so many forms and certificates and things, you can't say when.' He paused. 'Don't you like the idea? Last night you were saying I was so damn phlegmatic I hadn't sense enough to get married.'

'That was an unfortunate choice of words,' Judge Coates said. 'I didn't realize you were going to take it so hard. Yes. I like the idea.'

His face contorted a little, and Abner was stunned to see tears appear in the corner of his eyes. 'Are you all right, sir?' he said, starting up.

'Sit down!' said Judge Coates. He plucked at a pile of tissues on the table until he got hold of one. He daubed at his eyes. 'You can't tell what I mean by what I do,' he said hoarsely. 'It would be a favour to me if you wouldn't give things I can't help quite so much attention. Damnation, I'm a sick man!' He dropped the crumpled tissue.

'Well, I didn't mean to upset you,' Abner said in distress.

'Phlegmatic wasn't the word; it was obtuse,' Judge Coates said. 'What did I say that for? I don't mean it. You'd think I wanted to make you mad. I don't want to make anyone mad. I'm not fit to stand up to it. You least of all —'

He brought the cigarette up shakily, cocked it between his lips, and took a puff. 'There, that's over,' he said.'It just hit me a certain way. If I had to explain it I would only make it sillier. Foolish question, do I mind if you live here. I might ask you, do you mind if you live here. I'll have another stroke and die pretty soon; or if I don't, I'll be a drivelling idiot. Don't know whether you want to be in the same house with it. I wouldn't.'

Abner said, 'I don't think that follows at all. Jesse Gearhart told me his father had a stroke and practically got over it.'

'Well,' said Judge Coates, 'that's true; Mike did. I suppose I might. Just don't want to be such a fool as to count on it. When did Jesse tell you about his father?'

'The other day.'

'Oh. I wondered.' He crushed out the cigarette awkwardly. 'You're probably well out of that. I never liked politics myself. I don't mean I thought I was too good for it. Or if I did, it was when I was very young. Men act through self-interest; and if they do things you wouldn't do, you'd better not assume it's because you have a nobler character. There are noble and disinterested actions done every day; but I think most of them are impulsive. I don't think there's any such thing as a deliberate noble action. Deliberation always, has half an eye on how it will look; it wants something, if only admiration, for what it does. Did you ever see a law suit which aimed at disinterested justice?' He took another tissue and wiped his mouth. 'Senator Perkins used to say that when a man said he was seeking justice, what he meant, if he was plaintiff, was that he aimed to do someone dirt and the Court ought to help him; and if he was the defendant, that he already had done someone dirt, and the Court ought to protect him.'