mistress. "But I'm sorry, Dawkins; very sorry, indeed. We have
responsibilities toward these people! However--this is Thursday, isn't
it?--we'll have veal for lunch as usual--and she was so pretty!" she
added inconsequently.
"H'm. That was the trouble!" sniffed the housekeeper. "We're well rid of
her. You'd think a girl would have some consideration for her
employer--if nothing else. In a sense she is a guest in the house and
should behave herself as such!"
"Yes, that is quite true!" agreed her employer. "Still--yes, Brown Betty
is very well for dessert. That will do, Dawkins."
Behind the curtain of this casual conversation had been enacted a
melodrama as intensely vital and elemental as any of Shakespeare's
tragedies, for the day Dawkins had fired Katie O'Connell--"for reasons,"
as she said--and told her to go back where she came from or anywhere she
liked for that matter, so long as she got out of her sight, Katie's
brother Shane in the back room of McManus' gin palace gave Red
McGurk--for the same "reasons"--a certain option and, the latter having
scornfully declined to avail himself of it, had then and there put a
bullet through his neck. But this, naturally, Miss Beekman did not know.
As may have been already surmised Miss Althea was a gracious, gentle and
tender-hearted lady who never knowingly would have done a wrong to
anybody and who did not believe that simply because God had been pleased
to call her into a state of life at least three stories higher than her
kitchen she was thereby relieved from her duty toward those who occupied
it. Nevertheless, from the altitude of those three stories she viewed
them as essentially different from herself, for she came of what is
known as "a long line of ancestors." As, however, Katie O'Connell and
Althea Beekman were practically contemporaries, it is somewhat difficult
to understand how one of them could have had a succession of ancestors
that was any longer than that of the other. Indeed, Miss Beekman's
friend, Prof. Abelard Samothrace, of Columbia University, probably would
have admitted that just as the two had lived in the same house--albeit
at different levels--on Fifth Avenue, so their forebears at some
prehistoric period had, likely as not, occupied the same cave and had in
company waded on frosty mornings the ice-skimmed swamps of Mittel Europa
in pursuit of the cave bear, the mastodon and the woolly rhinoceros, and
for afternoon relaxation had made up twosomes for hunting wives with
stone clubs instead of mashies in their hairy prehensile hands.
It would seem, therefore, that--whatever of tradition might have
originated in the epoch in question--glimmerings of sportsmanship, of
personal pride, of tribal duty or of conscience ought to have been the
common heritage of them both. For it was assuredly true that while Miss
Katie's historic ancestors had been Celtiberians, clad on occasion only
in a thin coating of blue paint, Miss Althea's had dwelt in the dank
marshes of the Elbe and had been unmistakably Teutonic, though this
curse had been largely removed by racial intermarriage during subsequent
thousands of years. Indeed, it may well have been that in the dimmer
past some Beekman serf on bended knee had handed a gilded harp to some
King O'Connell on his throne. If the O'Connells were foreigners the
Beekmans, from the point of view of the aboriginal American, were no
less so simply because they had preceded them by a couple of hundred
years.
Tradition is not a matter of centuries but of ages. If Katie inherited
some of hers from the peat bogs adjacent to Tara's Halls in that remote
period when there were still snakes in Ireland, Miss Althea had
vicariously acquired others from the fur-clad barbarians described by
Tacitus who spent their leisure time in drinking, gambling or splitting
each other's skulls with stone mallets. On this subject see Spencer's
"Data of Ethics" and Lecky's "History of European Morals." But all this
entirely escaped Miss Althea, who suffered from the erroneous impression
that because she was a Beekman and lived in a stone mansion facing
Central Park she differed fundamentally not only from the O'Connells but
from the Smiths, the Pasquales, the Ivanovitches and the Ginsbergs, all
of whom really come of very old families. Upon this supposed difference
she prided herself.
Because she was, in fact, mistaken and because the O'Connells shared
with the Beekmans and the Ginsbergs a tradition reaching back to a
period when revenge was justice, and custom of kinsfolk the only law,
Shane O'Connell had sought out Red McGurk and had sent him unshriven to
his God. The only reason why this everyday Bowery occurrence excited any
particular attention was not that Shane was an O'Connell but that McGurk
was the son of a political boss of much influence and himself one of the
leaders of a notorious cohort of young ruffians who when necessary could
be relied upon to stuff a ballot box or otherwise to influence public
opinion. As Red was a mighty man in Gideon, so his taking off was an
event of moment, and he was waked with an elegance unsurpassed in the
annals of Cherry Hill.
"An' if ye don't put the son-of-a----- who kilt me b'y in th' chair, ye
name's mud--see?" the elder McGurk had informed District Attorney
Peckham the next morning. "I've told the cops who done it. Now you do
the rest--understand?"
Peckham understood very well. No one seeing the expression on McGurk's
purple countenance could have failed to do so.
"We'll get him! Don't you worry!" Peckham had assured the desolated
father with a manner subtly suggesting both the profoundest sympathy and
the prophetic glories of a juridical revenge in which the name of McGurk
would be upon every lip and the picture of the deceased, his family, and
the home in which they dwelt would be featured on the front page of
every journal. "We'll get him, all right!"
"See to it that ye do!" commented his visitor meaningly.
Therefore, though no one had seen him commit the crime, word was passed
along the line to pick up Shane O'Connell for the murder of Red McGurk.
It mattered not there was no evidence except the report of a muttered
threat or two and the lie passed openly the week before.
Everybody knew that Shane had done it, and why; though no one could tell
how he knew it. And because everybody knew, it became a political
necessity for Peckham to put him under arrest with a great fanfare of
trumpets and a grandiose announcement of the celerity with which the
current would be turned through his body.
The only fly in the ointment was the fact that O'Connell had walked into
the district attorney's office as soon as the rumor reached him and
quietly submitted to being arrested, saying merely: "I heard you wanted
me. Well, here I am!"
But though they badgered him for hours, lured him by every pretext to
confess, put a stool pigeon in the same cell with him, and resorted to
every trick, device and expedient known to the prosecutor's office to
trap him into some sort of an admission, they got nothing for their
pains. It was just one of those cases where the evidence simply wasn't
forthcoming. And yet Peckham was aware that unless he convicted
O'Connell his name would indeed be mud--or worse. This story, however,
is concerned less with the family honor of the O'Connells than with that
of the Beekmans.
Miss Althea was the last surviving member of her branch of the family.
Though she would probably have regarded it as slightly vulgar to have
been referred to as "one hundred per cent American" she was so nearly
so--except for a reminiscent affection for "the late dear Queen"--that
the phrase in her case would have been substantially correct. Her mother
had been the daughter of a distinguished Revolutionary statesman who had
been a signer of the Declaration of Independence, an ambassador and
justice of the Supreme Court as well; her father a celebrated newspaper
editor.
She had been born in the Prue and I period in Gramercy Park near what is
now The Players' Club, and the old colonial house with its white
trimmings and ornamental ironwork had been the scene of many a modest
gayety at a time when Emerson, Lowell, and George William Curtis were
viewed less as citizens than as high priests of Culture, sharing equally
in sanctity with the goddess thereof. She could just remember those
benign old gentlemen, as well as the many veterans of the Civil War who
dined at her father's decorous mahogany and talked of the preservation
of the Constitution and those other institutions to found which it is
generally assumed the first settlers landed on the Atlantic seaboard and
self-sacrificingly accepted real estate from the wily native in return
for whisky and glass beads. She was forty-seven years of age, a Colonial
Dame, a Daughter of the American Revolution, a member of the board of
directors of several charitable institutions, and she was worth a couple
of million dollars in railroad securities. On Sundays she always
attended the church in Stuyvesant Square frequented by her family, and
as late as 1907 did so in the famous Beekman C-spring victoria driven
by an aged negro coachman.
But besides being full of rectitude and good works--which of themselves
so often fail of attraction--Miss Althea was possessed of a face so
charming even in its slightly faded prettiness that one wondered how it
was possible that she could successfully have withstood the suitors who
must have crowded about her. Her house on Fifth Avenue was full of old
engravings of American patriots, and the library inherited from her
editorial parent was replete with volumes upon subjects which would have
filled a Bolshevik with disgust. Briefly, if ever Trotzky had become
Commissar of the Soviet of Manhattan, Miss Althea and those like her
would have been the first candidates for a drumhead court-martial.
She prided herself equally upon her adherence to religious principle and
the Acts of Congress. For the law, merely as law, she had the
profoundest veneration, viewing the heterogeneous statutes passed from
time to time by desultory legislators much as if they had in some
mysterious way been handed down from Mount Sinai along with the Ten
Commandments.
For any violator of the law she had the uttermost abhorrence, and the
only weakness in her ethics arose out of her failure to discriminate
between relative importances, for she undoubtedly regarded the sale of a
glass of beer after the closing hour as being quite as reprehensible as
grand larceny or the bearing of false witness. To her every judge must
be a learned, wise and honorable man because he stood for the
enforcement of the law of the land, and she never questioned whether or
not that law was wise or otherwise, which latter often--it must be
confessed--it was not.
In a word, though there was nothing progressive about Miss Althea she
was one of those delightful, cultivated, loyal and enthusiastic female
citizens who are rightfully regarded as vertebrae in the backbone of a
country which, after it has got its back up, can undoubtedly lick any
other nation on earth. It was characteristic of her that carefully
folded inside the will drawn for her by her family solicitor was a slip
of paper addressed to her heirs and next of kin requesting that at her
funeral the national anthem should be played and that her coffin should
be draped with the American flag.
But there was a somewhat curious if not uncommon inconsistency in Miss
Beekman's attitude toward lawbreakers in that once they were in prison
they instantly became objects of her gentlest solicitude. Thus she was a
frequent visitor at the Tombs, where she brought spiritual, and more
often, it must be frankly admitted, bodily comfort to those of the
inmates who were recommended by the district attorney and prison
authorities as worthy of her attention; and Prosecutor Peckham being not
unmindful of the possible political advantage that might accrue from
being on friendly terms with so well-known a member of the distinguished
family of Beekman, lost no opportunity to ingratiate himself with her
and gave orders, to his subordinates to make her path as easy as
possible. Thus quite naturally she had heard of Tutt & Tutt, and had a
casual acquaintance with the senior partner himself.
"That O'Connell is a regular clam--won't tell me anything at all!"
remarked Mr. Tutt severely, hanging up his hat on the office tree with
one hand while he felt for a match in his waistcoat pocket with the
other, upon the afternoon of the day that Miss Beekman had had the
conversation with Dawkins with which this story opens.
"National temperament," answered Bonnie Doon, producing the desired
match. "It's just like an Irishman to refuse point-blank to talk to the
lawyer who has been assigned to defend him. He's probably afraid he'll
make some admission from which you will infer he's guilty. No Irishman
ever yet admitted that he was guilty of anything!"
"Well, I've never met a defendant of any other nationality who would,
either," replied Mr. Tutt, pulling vigorously at his stogy. "Even so,
this chap O'Connell is a puzzle to me. 'Go ahead and defend me,' said he
today, 'but don't ask me to talk about the case, because I won't.' I
give it up. He wouldn't even tell me where he was on the day of the
murder."
Bonnie grunted dubiously.
"There may be a very good reason for that!" he retorted. "If what rumor
says is true he simply hunted for McGurk until he found him and put a
lead pellet back of his ear."
"And also, if what rumor says is true," supplemented Tutt, who entered
at this moment, "a good job it was, too. McGurk was a treacherous, dirty
blackguard, the leader of a gang of criminals, even if he was, as they
all agree, a handsome rascal who had every woman in the district on
tenterhooks. Any girl in this case?"
Bonnie shrugged his shoulders.
"They claim so; only there's nothing definite. The O'Connells are well
spoken of."
"If there was, that would explain why he wouldn't talk," commented Mr.
Tutt. "That's the devil of it. You can't put in a defense under the
unwritten law without besmirching the very reputation you are trying to
protect."
The senior partner of Tutt & Tutt wheeled his swivel chair to the window
and crossing his congress boots upon the sill gazed contemplatively down
upon the shipping.
"Unwritten law!" sarcastically exclaimed Tutt from the doorway. "There
ain't no such animal in these parts!"
"You're quite wrong!" retorted his elder partner. "Most of our
law--ninety-nine per cent of it, in fact--is unwritten."
"Excuse me!" interjected Bonnie Doon, abandoning his usual flippancy.
"What is that you said, Mr. Tutt?"
"That ninety-nine per cent of the laws by which we are governed are
unwritten laws, just as binding as the printed ones upon our statute
books, which after all are only the crystallization of the sentiments
and opinions of the community based upon its traditions, manners,
customs and religious beliefs. For every statute in print there are a
hundred that have no tangible existence, based on our sense of decency,
of duty and of honor, which are equally controlling and which it has
never been found necessary to reduce to writing, since their infraction
usually brings its own penalty or infringes the more delicate domain of
private conscience where the crude processes of the criminal law cannot
follow. The laws of etiquette and fair play are just as obligatory as
legislative enactments--the Ten Commandments as efficacious as the Penal
Code."
"Don't you agree with that, Tutt?" demanded Bonnie. "Every man's
conscience is his own private unwritten law."
Tutt looked skeptical.
"Did you say every man had a conscience?" he inquired.
"And it makes a lot of trouble sometimes," continued Mr. Tutt, ignoring
him. "You remember when old Cogswell was on the bench and a man was
brought before him for breaking his umbrella over the head of a fellow
who had insulted the defendant's wife, he said to the jury: 'Gentlemen,
if this plaintiff had called my wife a name like that I'd have smashed
my umbrella over his head pretty quick. However, that's not the law!
Take the case, gentlemen!'"
"Well, I guess I was wrong," admitted Tutt. "Of course, that is
unwritten law. People don't like to punish a man for resenting a slur
upon his wife's reputation."
"But you see where that leads you?" remarked his partner. "The so-called
unwritten law is based on our inherited idea of chivalry. A lady's honor
and reputation were sacred, and her knight was prepared instantly to
defend it with the last drop of his blood. A reflection on her honesty
was almost as unbearable as one upon her virtue. Logically, the
unwritten law ought to permit women to break their contracts and do
practically anything they see fit."
"They do, don't they--the dear things!" sighed Bonnie.
"I remember," interjected Tutt brightly, "when it was the unwritten law
of Cook County, Illinois--that's Chicago, you know--that any woman could
kill her husband for the life-insurance money. Seriously!"
"There's no point of chivalry that I can see involved in that--it's
merely good business," remarked Mr. Doon, lighting another cigarette.
"All the same it's obvious that the unwritten law might be stretched a
long way. It's a great convenience, though, on occasion!"
"We should be in an awful stew if nowadays we substituted ideas of
chivalry for those of justice," declared Mr. Tutt. "Fortunately the
danger is past. As someone has said, 'The women, once our superiors,
have become our equals!'"
"We don't even give 'em our seats in the Subway," commented Tutt
complacently. "No, we needn't worry about the return of chivalry--in New
York at any rate."
"I should say not!" exclaimed Miss Wiggin, entering at that moment with
a pile of papers, as nobody rose.
"But," insisted Bonnie, "all the same there are certainly plenty of
cases where if he had to choose between them any man would obey his
conscience rather than the law."
"Of course, there are such cases," admitted Mr. Tutt. "But we ought to
discourage the idea as much as possible."
"Discourage a sense of honor?" exclaimed Miss Wiggin. "Why, Mr. Tutt!"
"It depends on what you mean by honor," he retorted. "I don't take much
stock in the kind of honor that makes an heir apparent 'perjure himself
like a gentleman' about a card game at a country house."
"Neither do I," she returned, "any more than I do in the kind of honor
that compels a man to pay a gambling debt before he pays his tailor, but
I do believe that there may be situations where, though it would not be
permissible to perjure oneself, honor would require one to refuse to
obey the law."
"That's a pretty dangerous doctrine," reflected Mr. Tutt. "For everybody
would be free to make himself the judge of when he ought to respect the
law and when he oughtn't. We can easily imagine that the law would come
out at the small end of the horn."
"In matters of conscience--which, I take it, is the same thing as one's
sense of honor--one has got to be one's own judge," declared Miss Wiggin
firmly.
"The simplest way," announced Tutt, "is to take the position that the
law should always be obeyed and that the most honorable man is he who
respects it the most."
"Yes, the safest and also the most cowardly!" retorted Miss Wiggin.
"Supposing the law required you to do something which you personally
regarded not only as morally wrong but detestable, would you do it?"
"It wouldn't!" protested Tutt with a grimace. "The law is the perfection
of reason."
"But I am entitled, am I not, to suppose, for purposes of argument, that
it might?" she inquired caustically. "And I say that our sense of honor
is the most precious thing we've got. It's our duty to respect our
institutions and obey the law whether we like it or not, unless it
conflicts with our conscience, in which case we ought to defy it and
take the consequences!"
"Dear me!" mocked Tutt. "And be burned at the stake?"
"If necessary; yes!"
"I don't rightly get all this!" remarked Bonnie. "Me for the lee side of
the law, every time!"
"It's highly theoretical," commented Tutt. "As usual with our
discussions."
"Not so theoretical as you might think!" interrupted his senior,
hastening to reenforce Miss Wiggin. "Nobody can deny that to be true to
oneself is the highest principle of human conduct, and that ''tis man's
perdition to be safe when for the truth he ought to die.' That's why we
reverence the early Christian martyrs. But when it comes to choosing
between what we loosely call honor and what the law requires--"
"But I thought the law embodied our ideas of honor!" replied Tutt.
"Didn't you say so--a few hours earlier in this conversation? As our
highest duty is to the state, it is a mere play on words, in my humble
opinion, to speak of honor as distinguished from law or the obligation
of one's oath in a court of justice. I bet I can find plenty of
authorities to that effect in the library!"
"Of course you can," countered Miss Wiggin. "You can find an authority
on any side of any proposition you want to look for. That's why one's
own sense of honor is so much more reliable than the law. What is the
law, anyhow? It's what some judge says is the law--until he's reversed.
Do you suppose I'd surrender my own private ideas of honor to a casual
ruling from a judge who very likely hadn't the remotest idea of what I
think is honorable?"
"You'll be jailed for contempt before you get through!" Tutt warned her.
"The fact of the matter is," concluded Mr. Tutt, "that honor and law
haven't anything to do with one another. The courts have constantly
pointed that out from the earliest days, though judges like, when they
can, to make the two seem one and the same. Chief Baron Bowes, I
remember, said in some case in 1743, 'The court can't determine what is
honor.' No, no; the two are different, and that difference will always
make trouble. Isn't it nearly tea time?"
* * * * *
Miss Beekman was just stepping off the elevator on the first floor of
the Tombs the next afternoon on one of her weekly visits when she came
face to face with Mr. Tutt.
She greeted him cordially, for she had taken rather a fancy to the
shabby old man, drawn to him, in spite of her natural aversion to all
members of the criminal bar, by the gentle refinement of his
weather-beaten face. "I hope you have had a successful day."
The lawyer shook his head in a pseudo-melancholy manner.
"Unfortunately, I have not," he answered whimsically. "My only client
refuses to speak to me! Perhaps you could get something out of him for
me."
"Oh, they all talk to me readily enough!" she replied. "I fancy they
know I'm harmless. What is his name?"
"Shane O'Connell."
"What is his offense?"
"He is charged with murder."
"Oh!"
Miss Althea recoiled. Her charitable impulses did not extend to
defendants charged with homicide. There was too much notoriety connected
with them, for one thing; there was nothing she hated so much as
notoriety.
"Seriously," he went on with earnestness, "I wish you'd have a word with
him. It's pretty hard to have to defend a man and not to know a thing
about his side of the case. It's almost your duty, don't you think?"
Miss Althea hesitated, and was lost.
"Very well," she answered reluctantly, "I'll see what I can do. Perhaps
he needs some medicine or letter paper or something. I'll get an order
from the warden and go right back and see him."
Twenty minutes later Shane O'Connell faced Miss Beekman sullenly across
the deal table of the counsel room. A ray of late sunshine fell through
the high grating of the heavily barred window upon a face quite
different from those which Miss Althea was accustomed to encounter in
these surroundings, for it showed no touch of depravity or evil habits,
and confinement had not yet deprived its cheeks of their rugged mantle
of crimson or its eyes of their bold gleam.
He was little more than a boy, this murderer, as handsome a lad as ever
swaggered out of County Kerry.
"An' what may it be that leads you to send for such as me, Miss
Beekman!" he demanded, glowering at her.
She felt suddenly unnerved, startled and rather shocked at his use of
her name. Where could he have discovered it? From the keeper, probably,
she decided. All her usual composure, her quiet self-possession, her
aloof and slightly condescending sweetness--had deserted her.