The Listener (21 page)

“But that would have hurt Ruth even more. There was enough damn talk. I believe in letting it die out. Ruth had loved him; he’d never loved her; that was the worst part. And now he’s in politics!

“Well,” said the judge in a spent voice, “that’s all. Ruth is taking an interest in life again. She’s going out, and sometimes we even hear her laugh. After all, she’s only twenty-three.”

The room waited. ‘All the time in the world’. Where had he heard that about this place? The man who listened had ‘all the time in the world’. I haven’t, thought the judge grimly. It’s nearly one now.

He said to the still curtains, “I don’t know why I’ve told you all this. It isn’t like me at all. In fact, I haven’t talked so much before about poor Ruth even to Helen. I didn’t come here like a maudlin fool to tell you about my affairs. Of what interest could they be to you? I came to tell you about a man, a defendant, in my court, who is being tried for murder. Perhaps you’ve read about the Hathaway case? Do you know anything about it at all?”

It was strange that the silent room appeared to have answered him in the affirmative. The judge sighed.

“I’ve known John Hathaway for years. A man my own age. His father was a professor at Yale many years ago until he died. John and I had little in common. He was a little too remote and scholarly for me, though he is an excellent businessman. We don’t see much of each other, though his wife and mine are old friends. A cold and formal stick of a man. Not one you could imagine ever committing a deliberately planned murder. Under any circumstances. Even under those circumstances.”

The judge stopped speaking. His face became set and frozen. He contemplated the curtains for a long and silent time.

He said, “Circumstances similar to mine — and Ruth’s. He had only one child, a daughter, about Ruth’s age. Alice. A quiet girl; I remember her as a child when she came to see Ruth. Not pretty, like Ruth. Tall, thin, a little awkward, but intellectual, like her father. She married well too. I never did care for the Eldridge family, but that’s of no consequence. They have all those lumber mills near the river. Alice married Dick Eldridge, a competent enough young man, considerably older than Ruth, but morose and sullen. I’d sometimes see him at the club. They say he was his father’s right hand in the business. A bad-tempered face; once, when he was playing golf and lost, he hit Jack Moley over the head with an iron. He was almost expelled for that, but the family influence and money kept him in after all. I voted for his expulsion myself.

“But that’s neither here nor there. Two months ago, however, John Hathaway calmly loaded a gun he had bought, drove over to his daughter’s apartment. He knew she wasn’t there; in fact, she was with her mother. I’ll come back to that in a moment. But calmly he went into the apartment and found Dick Eldridge sullenly reading, and without a word he shot and killed him. He then immediately called the police and gave himself up.”

The judge found himself sweating. He pulled out his damp handkerchief and wiped his face. With amazement he looked at his hands. They were trembling. He cleared his throat several times before he could speak again.

“It’s first-degree murder, of course. He could simply have persuaded his daughter to leave Eldridge and come home; he could have settled things the way I did. But there’s something else, though it’s no excuse, under the Law, in spite of what the defense attorneys try to tell me. They met with me in my chambers, with the prosecuting attorney, for a confidence they didn’t want to make public. Yet.

“It seems that Alice and Eldridge hadn’t been married three months when he began to abuse her. I can say that for Robert Shelton — he was too easygoing and even too good-natured ever to have abused Ruth. Why that stupid girl, Alice, didn’t leave him, I don’t know. Probably loved him in spite of everything. Women can be ridiculous about these things; there are times I can’t understand even Helen and Ruth.

“In any event, the defense attorneys told me, Alice became pregnant four months before the murder. Eldridge, they said, became violent over it. He wanted no children; he hated children; he detested them. He forced Alice to have an abortion; that was about five weeks before the murder. A horrible thing, I admit, but I don’t agree with the attorneys that abortion is exactly in the same class as a man taking a gun and killing another man in cold blood. An adult. Of course someone bungled; the — devils — often do, you know. And Alice almost lost her life. She was in the hospital for a month; septicemia. Dreadful, yes. Then she went home to her parents, still sick. In fact, the girl is sick even now. The attorneys, who are noted for being melodramatic, showed me photographs of the girl in her bed. She looked like a corpse. Poor girl.

“I can understand, in a way,” said the judge after a few moments. “Hathaway lost his head, even though he had carefully planned the murder. He admitted verifying Eldridge’s presence in the apartment. He had taken his daughter’s key to let himself in quietly and give Eldridge no time to defend himself. He did not plead self-defense. In his statement before the trial he said he intended to kill his son-in-law. It was verified, by the way, that not only had Alice had that abortion but at the time of her admission to the hospital she was covered with bruises. Unfortunate. Terrible. However, even that does not justify cold-blooded murder. The Law is explicit on that. Self-defense, defending another in mortal, imminent danger, defense of property: these are admissible as defenses in cases of murder. In the majority of the cases the defendant goes free, or, at the worst, he receives a year or two in prison for manslaughter, third degree, or the sentence is suspended.

“Hathaway can claim none of the circumstances. His daughter is a young woman Ruth’s age, but she certainly wasn’t dragged to the abortionist; if she went unwillingly, she did go on her own two legs. True, she’s still very sick and broken. Unfortunate, yes. She could have left Eldridge as Ruth finally left Shelton. She could have gotten a divorce. But the defense attorneys say that she loved that wretch, in spite of everything, until the abortion.

“I just don’t understand women, of course. And I don’t understand why Hathaway wasn’t sensible enough just to take back his daughter and help her divorce her husband and let it go at that. He didn’t have to kill Eldridge.”

The judge shook his head over and over. “I made that clear to the defense attorneys. I suggested that they bring the abuse and abortion matters into court, but I also assured them that these in themselves are not an excuse for first degree murder. Later Hathaway, when consulted, explicitly forbade it, and I don’t blame him. After all, the girl has her life to live.

“Tomorrow I must charge the jury. I must inform them fully of the Law. Deliberate, planned, cold-blooded homicide, as admitted by John Hathaway, is first-degree murder. That is the Law. You can’t get around it. That is the Law. Grudge killings are no excuse; there are no extenuating circumstances. Hathaway, if the jury brings in a first-degree murder verdict, will probably be executed. He doesn’t seem to care, by the way. He merely sits with his attorneys, looking as remote and cool as ever, and that sort of thing doesn’t prejudice juries in your favor. In fact, that’s a hanging jury if I ever saw one.

“I’m sorry for Hathaway. But there is the Law. Damn it why wasn’t he at least in possession of enough self-control as I was? And I’m like him in a way. Ruth, with our help, Helen’s and mine, was extricated from the mess she was in.”

The judge paused. “I’ve told you that Hathaway’s wife is an old friend of Helen’s. Naturally, when I knew the case was to come before me — no one had any doubt but that I would adhere to the letter of the Law — I told Helen she could not meet Margaret Hathaway any longer for their weekly lunches. She understood. At first. Then Margaret did really an unpardonable thing under the circumstances. She hysterically called Helen one night and told her of the abuse and the abortion and begged Helen to try to influence me in behalf of her husband. Of course the poor woman is half out of her mind now, with her sick daughter and her indicted husband, but still she should have been more discreet.

“And Helen,” said the judge angrily, “should be more discreet too. She knows that she is never to speak of my cases to me or discuss them. Yet now, for over a week, she has been crying desperately for me to help Hathaway. When I say ‘desperately’, I mean exactly that, and I’ve never seen Helen in such a condition before except for the time Ruth had her nervous and physical collapse and almost died — ”

Very slowly the judge’s hard-set face whitened, until his lips were dead white and the very tip of his nose. Very slowly he sat up rigidly in the marble chair. His very breath seemed to stop.

He spoke whisperingly, “I’m by nature a violent man —Helen knows that. I have self-control, but only God knows what effort I have to use to exercise it. I’ve wanted to kill —once or twice in my life. But I didn’t, of course.”

His throat suddenly became stiff and dry and he could not swallow.

Then he croaked: “Ruth!”

He remembered his daughter’s illness. He remembered that he had become wildly impatient with her doctors. They had been evasive; he could not get them to tell him exactly what was wrong with his daughter. “Nervous and physical collapse.” The doctors were old friends. They would hide —

“Ruth!” said the judge again.

Ruth had almost died. People don’t die of nervous and physical collapses in the modern world, with doctors all about them. They don’t have the stresses. Particularly Ruth. She had been hurt by her marriage, but one doesn’t die of such a hurt today. “Men have died, and worms have eaten them — but not for love.” No. And the fever! The burning, raging fever the girl had suffered for weeks. Infection. The half delirium, the mutterings, the murmurs, the tossing in bed. The antibiotics! He had forgotten them. They had given Ruth antibiotics. Septicemia. The weeks of recovery, the feeble walking, the expressions of pain, the sudden silent weeping, the shaking of Ruth’s head when questioned, her muteness. She would not talk to her father.

She and Helen had never told him. They knew he was a coldly violent man when aroused. They knew he might have killed.

The judge stood up, straight and rigorous, and his face was terrible.

He looked at the curtain. “I’d have killed him,” he said. “I hope to God I never see him again. I might not be able to control myself. Ruth!”

He caught the back of the marble chair to steady himself. “The Law,” he said dully.

A man who committed a deliberate, cold-blooded murder was usually a criminal. If he was not a criminal, then he was temporarily insane, driven to an act against all his civilized and intelligent impulses. A man like Hathaway was not a criminal. He had been impelled by a force stronger than all his training, an outrage that was beyond his ability to withstand. He had killed because of one murder which had been done, and abortion really was murder, after all. He killed to avenge that murder and his daughter’s suffering. Reduced to his basic human essentials, he had murdered. In vengeance for the innocent, one who had been destroyed and another who had almost been destroyed.

The judge found himself walking unsteadily to the curtains. He thrust out his hand to the button. He whispered, “You must tell me what to do. There is the Law — ”

The curtains rolled away.

The judge fell back as swiftly when he saw the light and who stood in the light. And then he stood for a long time looking into the eyes turned gently upon him.

He said at last, “Yes, I remember. It was the letter of the Law that killed, wasn’t it? It’s been a long time since I first heard that. And it is the spirit of it that saves. I’d forgotten. I was like those Pharisees. A violated law was a violated law. There was no appeal from it. No mercy. I remember now what you said.”

He sat down in the chair because he was trembling. “I’ve been a bad judge,” he continued. “I have followed the letter of the Law and so charged all those other juries. Thank God many of them disregarded me. Thank God.

“I will demand that Margaret Hathaway come into court and tell the story of Alice to the jury. The jury are simple people. I’m sorry I thought so little of them. They loathe the murder of the innocent. There are three young women there who are mothers. I will overrule any protest of the prosecution. Margaret — and I feel it — wants to come and tell what led up to the murder. Her husband’s life is at stake. And Alice — she would not want her father to die merely to save her ‘name’. No wonder the child is so sick and will not get well! Stupid Hathaway, who is as stupid as I’d have been — if I had known the same circumstances before!

“If necessary, and the jury wants it, we’ll go to Alice. She will tell. Yes, she will tell.”

He stood up, still white, but resolute. “The simplicity of the people is much wiser than any philosophy, their sympathies quick and certain, their pity instantaneous. Yes. The jury and I — we will save John Hathaway together.”

He smiled a little. “I must go home to Helen now. It was she who begged me to talk to you. She knew. Didn’t she tell me that Ruth did not begin to get well until she came here too? I wonder if she saw your face. The mercy of your face.”