Teddy was not called on to face a bunch of men till going to the
courtroom for his trial. Dressed long before the hour in a new dark-blue
suit, fresh linen, and a dark-blue tie, his prison pallor, a little like
that of death, put him out of the list of the active and free. As he sat
on the edge of his bunk, somber with dread, he was nevertheless obliged
to find suitable jocosities with which to answer the good-luck wishes
that came slithering along the walls from the neighboring cells. It was
half past nine before two guards whom he had never seen before, stalwart
fellows well over six feet, came to the door and unlocked it.
"Ready, Follett? Time's come."
Springing to his feet, he found handcuffs slipped round his wrists
before he was aware of what was being done. It was an unexpected
indignity. He had never been handcuffed before.
"Say, fellows," he protested, "I'll go all right. I don't want these on
me."
"Come along wid ye."
The words were friendly rather than rough, as was also the hand of a
guard on each shoulder as they steered him along the corridor. The Brig
is a rambling building, or succession of buildings, with courthouse and
house of detention under the same series of roofs. The pilgrimage was
long--upstairs, downstairs, through passages, past offices, past
courtrooms, with guards, police, clerks, lawyers, litigants, loungers,
standing about everywhere. The sight of a man in handcuffs arrested all
eyes for the moment, and stilled all tongues. With his glances flying
from right to left and from left to right, Teddy again began to feel the
sense of separation from the human race which had struck to his soul
that day on the marshes.
Of his other impressions, the chief was that of squalor. It seemed as if
all the elements had been brought together that would make poor Justice
vulgar and unimpressive. Out of a squalid cell he had been pushed along
squalid hallways, through groups of squalid faces, into a squalid
courtroom, where he was ushered into a squalid cage, long and narrow,
with a seat hardly wider than a knife blade. Once within the cage the
handcuffs were taken off, the door was locked, and each of the stalwart
guards took his stand at one end. The cage being raised some six or
eight inches above the level of the floor, the boy was well in sight of
everyone. It was like being on a throne--or a Calvary.
On taking his seat, he was vaguely conscious of a bank of faces, tier
above tier, at the back of the courtroom. Before him some fifteen or
twenty officials, reporters, and lawyers lolled at their tables, walked
about, yawned, picked their teeth, or told anecdotes that raised a
smothered laugh. Most of them struck him as untidily dressed; few looked
intelligent. Among them a portly man, whom he afterward saw as the
district attorney, in a cutaway coat, with a line of piqué at the
opening of his waistcoat, seemed like a person in fancy costume.
Everyone paused as he entered the cage, but, a glance having satisfied
their curiosity, they paid him no further attention.
The trial lasted three days, passing before his eyes like a
motion-picture film of which he was only a spectator. Try as he would,
he found it hard to believe that the proceedings had anything to do with
him. "All this fuss," he would comment to himself, grimly, "to get the
right to kill a man." The strain of being under so many cruel or
indifferent eyes sent him back with relief to his cell, where during the
nights he slept soundly.
His one bit of surprise came from Stenhouse's final argument in his
defense. Up to that point, both defense and prosecution had struck him
as more or less silly. The state had tried to prove him a desperado whom
it was dangerous to let live; the defense had done its best to show him
a youth of arrested intelligence, not responsible for his acts. He
grinned inwardly when Jennie, Gussie, and half a dozen of his old chums
testified to foolish pranks, forgotten or half forgotten by himself, in
the hope of convincing the court that he had never had the normal sense.
But Stenhouse in his concluding speech transcended all that, taking
Teddy's own stand as the only one which offered the ghost of a chance of
acquittal. He began his final appeal quietly, in a tone little more than
colloquial.
"There's an old saying, a variant on something said by Benjamin
Franklin, which we might remember oftener than we do. It's terse, pithy,
humorous, wise. Some one has called it the finest bit of free verse
composed in the eighteenth century. Listen to it. '_It is hard to make
an empty sack stand upright._' So it is. The empty sack collapses of its
own accord. It can't do anything but collapse. It was not meant to stand
upright. To demand that it shall stand upright is to insist on the
impossible. A full sack will stand as solid as a tree. A group of full
sacks will support one another. Put the empty sack among them and from
the very law of gravitation it will go down helplessly. Now, gentlemen
of the jury, you're being asked to bring in a verdict against the empty
sack--the sack that's been carefully kept empty--because it hasn't the
strength and stability of that which all the coffers of the country have
combined to fill."
With this as a text, Stenhouse drew a picture of the industrious man who
is limited by the very nature of his industry. He is not limited by his
own desire, but by the use society wishes to make of him. Serving a
turn, he is schooled to serve that turn, and to serve no other turn.
This schooling takes him unawares. He doesn't know it has begun before
waking to find himself drilled to a system from which only a giant can
escape. Few men being giants, the average man plods on because he
doesn't know what else to do. There is rarely anything else _for_ him to
do. Having taken the first ill-paid job that comes his way, he hasn't
meant to give himself to it all his life. He dreams of something bigger,
more brilliant, more productive. The boy who runs errands sees himself a
merchant; the lad who becomes a clerk looks forward to being a partner;
the young man who enters a bank is sure that some day he will be bank
president.
"Sometimes, gentlemen, these early visions work out to a reality. But in
the vast majority of cases, the youth, before he ceases to be a youth,
finds himself where the horse is when he has once submitted to the
bridle. He can go only as he is driven. Life is organized not to let him
go in any other way. Needing him for a certain purpose, it keeps him to
that purpose. Work, taken as a great corporate thing, is made up of
hundreds of millions of tiny tasks each of which calls for a man. The
man being found, he must be trimmed to the size of his task."
Stenhouse had no quarrel with methods universally followed by civilized
man. To criticize them was not his intention, as it was not his
intention to complain because man had not yet brought in the Golden Age.
"But I do claim that the smaller the task to which a man is nailed down,
and the smaller the pay he is able to earn, the greater the
responsibility of collective society toward that individual."
There was a time, he declared, when much had been said to the discredit
of slavery; but one thing could be urged in its favor. The man who had
been kept throughout his life to one small job was not thrown out in his
old age to provide for himself as he could. Having worked for society,
as society was constituted then, society recognized at least the duty of
taking care of him. Stenhouse disclaimed any comparison between free
American labor and a servile condition; he was striving only for a
principle. Men couldn't be screwed down during all their working lives
to the lowest wage on which body and soul could be kept together, and
then be judged by the same standards as those who had had opportunity to
make provision for themselves and their families. The same
interpretation of the law couldn't be made to cover the cases of the
full sack and the empty one.
"And yet," he went on, changing his tone with his theme, "the empty sack
is of value because it can be filled. Coarse, cheap, negligible as it
seems, it is much too good to throw away. It is an asset to production,
to the country's trade, to the whole world's wealth. And, gentlemen,
what shall we say when we call that empty sack--a man?"
The value of the human asset was the next point to which he led his
listeners.
"It is only a truism to say that among all the precious things with
which the Almighty has blessed his creation the most precious is a human
life; and yet we live in a world which seems to believe this so little
that we must sometimes remind ourselves that it is so. Within a few
years we have seen millions of men reckoned merely as _stuff_. As
productive assets to the race, they haven't counted. We could read of a
day's loss on the battlefield running up into the thousands and never
turn a hair. We came to regard a young man's life as primarily a thing
to throw away. It is for this reason, gentlemen of the jury, that I
venture to remind you that a young man's life is primarily a thing to
save. It may be a truism to say that a human life is the most precious
of all created things; but it is a truism of which we are only now, to
our bitter and incalculable cost, beginning to realize the truth."
He went on to draw a picture of the contributions to the general good
made by the Folletts, father and son. Their work had been humble, but it
had been essential. Essential work faithfully performed should guarantee
an old age protected against penury. He reminded his hearers that he was
not opposed to the law of supply and demand, which was the only known
method by which the business of the world could be carried on. He only
pleaded for the same humanity to a man as was shown to a broken-down old
horse. From his one interview with Lizzie, Stenhouse had got what he
called "the good line," "_Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treadeth out
the corn._" Of this he now made use, following it up with St. Paul's
explanation: "Doth God take care for oxen? Or saith he it altogether for
our sakes? For our sakes, no doubt, this is written: that he that
ploweth may plow in hope; and that he that thresheth in hope should be
partaker of his hope."
"Gentlemen, so long as we live in a society in which the vast majority
of us can never be partakers of the hope with which we started out, so
long must justice take account of the suffering of the poor muzzled
brute that treadeth out the corn. If he goes frenzied and runs amuck, he
cannot be judged by the standards which apply to him who has been left
unmuzzled and free to satisfy his wants. It is not fair; it is not
human. It is true that to protect your own interests you have the power
to shoot him down; but when he lies dead at your feet, no more muzzled
in death than he was in life, there is surely somewhere in the universe
an avenging force that is on his side, and which will make you--you as
representatives of the society which has placed its action in your
hands--and you as twelve private individuals with duties and
consciences--there is somewhere in the universe this avenging force
which will require his blood at your hands and make you pay the penalty.
Surely you can find a better use for that valuable asset, a young man's
life, than just to take it away. For the sake of the public whose honor
is in your keeping, you must play the game squarely. For the sake of
your own future peace of mind, you must not add your own crime to this
poor boy's misfortune. Your duty at this minute is not merely to
interpret the dead letter of a law; it is to be the voice of the People
whom you represent. Remember that by the verdict you bring in that
People will be committed to the most destructive of all destructive
acts, or it will get expression for that deep, human common sense which
transcends written phrases to act in the spirit of the greatest of us
all, judging not according to the appearance--not according to the
appearance, gentlemen, and you remember who counseled that--but judging
righteous judgment."
He fell back into his seat, exhausted. He was so impressive and
impassioned as to convince many of his hearers that he believed his own
plea, while to some who had considered the verdict a certainty it was
now in doubt.
Among Teddy's friends a hope arose that, in spite of all expectation to
the contrary, he might be saved. Bob looked over and smiled. Teddy
smiled back, but mainly because he rejoiced in what he felt to be his
justification. He couldn't see how they could convict him after such a
setting forth as that, though for the consequences of acquittal he had
so little heart.
In the excitement of the courtroom, the judge's voice, when he began to
give the jury their instructions, fell like cool, quiet rain on
thunderous sultriness. He was a small man, with a leathery, unemotional
face, framed by an iron-gray wig of faultless side-parting and long,
straight, unnaturally smooth hair. He had the faculty of seeming
attentive without being influenced. Listening, reasoning, asking a
question, or settling a disputed point, he gave the impression of having
reduced intelligence to the soulless accuracy of a cash register.
He reminded the jury that the law was not on trial; society was not on
trial; the industrial experience of one Josiah Follett was not a feature
in the case. They must not allow the issue to be confused by the social
arguments which befogged so many of the questions of the day. It was
quite possible that the world was not as perfect as it might be; it was
even possible that the law was not the most perfect law that could be
passed. But these were considerations into which they could not enter.
In merely approaching them, they would lose their way. The law as it
stands is the voice of the People as it is; and the only questions
before them were, first, whether or not the accused had broken that law,
and second, if he had broken it, to what degree. In answering these
questions, they must limit themselves to the bare facts of the charge.
With the prisoner's temptations they had nothing to do, except in so far
as they tended to create intent. The consequences to his person, whether
in the way of liberty or of the last penalty, were no concern of others.
Justice in itself, viewed as justice in the abstract, was no concern of
theirs. They were not, however, to burden their consciences with the
fear that the accused was thus deprived of protection. The duty of a
jury was not protection, but discernment. The administration of the law
was far too big and complex a thing for any one body of men to deal
with. Justice having many aspects, the law had as many departments.
Protection was in other hands than theirs. The application of justice
pure and simple, involving punishment for guilt without excluding pity
for the provocation, was duly guaranteed by the methods of the state.
They would find their task simplified by dismissing all such hesitations
from their minds and confining themselves to the definite question which
he repeated. Had the prisoner at the bar broken the existing law, and if
he had so broken it, to what degree?
Having explained the difference between manslaughter and murder, as well
as between first-degree murder and second, he admitted that, in case the
accused was found guilty, there was much to indicate the second degree
rather than the first. There was, however, one damning fact. The hand
that had shot Peter Flynn went on at once to shoot William Jackman. The
killing of one man might have been an accident. If not an accident, it
might still have mitigating features. But for the murderer of a first
man to proceed at once to become the murderer of a second indicated a
planned and deliberate intent....
When the court had adjourned and the jury had retired to consider their
verdict, one of the guards unlocked the cage and Teddy was taken down by
a corkscrew staircase to a room immediately below. It was a small room,
lighted by one feeble bulb, and aired from an air shaft. A table and two
chairs stood in the middle of the room; a shiny, well-worn bench was
fixed to one of the walls. The guards took the chairs; Teddy sat down on
the bench. One of the guards cut off a piece of tobacco and put it in
his mouth; the other lighted a cheap cigar. Taking another from an upper
waistcoat pocket, he held it out toward Teddy.
"Have a smoke, young fella?"
Teddy shook his head. He was hardly aware of being addressed. Nothing
else was said to him, and the guards, almost silently, began a game of
cards. This waiting with prisoners for verdicts was always a tedious
affair, and one to be got through patiently.
To Teddy, it was not so much tedious as it was unreal. He sat with arms
folded, his head sunk, and the foot of the leg which was thrown across
the other leg kicking outward mechanically. Except for a rare grunted
remark between the players, there was no sound but the slap of the cards
on the table and the scooping in of the tricks.
After nearly half an hour the door opened and Bob Collingham came in
with a basket containing sandwiches and a thermos bottle of hot coffee.
With a word of explanation to the guards, he was allowed to take his
seat beside the prisoner.
"Hello, old sport! Must be relieved that it's so soon going to be over.
Brought you something to eat."
With this introduction, they took up commonplace ground as if it was a
commonplace occasion. Teddy asked after his mother and sisters; Bob gave
him the family news. Of the trial they said nothing. Of what they were
waiting for no more was said than that Bob had persuaded Jennie and
Gussie to go home, promising to come and tell them the decision. Lizzie
and Gladys had not appeared in the courtroom at all. Of all this Teddy
approved as he munched his sandwiches stolidly.
The supply of food and coffee being large, they invited the guards to
share with them. The invitation was accepted, the officers suspending
their game. The talk became friendly, commenting on the judge's wig and
the glass eye of the foreman of the jury, but not touching directly on
the trial. These subjects, as well as the supply of sandwiches,
exhausted, the guards returned to their game, the two young men being
left to themselves.
For the most part they sat in silence--a silence as nearly cheerful as
the circumstances permitted.
"Don't worry about me, Bob," Teddy murmured once. "I'm not going to care
much whichever way it is. Honest to God! I don't say I wouldn't like it
if they sent me back home; but if they don't--"
Allowing his companion to finish the sentence for himself, he lapsed
into silence again.
Another time, speaking as if subterranean thought came for a moment to
the surface, he said:
"I liked what you said about hardness--and pluck. I've been practicing
away on them both--making myself tough inside. Funny how you can, isn't
it? You think at first that, because you're soft, you've got to be soft;
but you find out that you're just what you like to make yourself. That's
a great line, Bob, '_Thou therefore endure hardness as a good soldier of
Jesus Christ._' You watch," he added, with a tremulous smile, "and
you'll see me doing it."
"All right, old boy, I'll watch, but we'll all be doing it with you.
We're practicing, too. Jennie and the girls are regular bricks, and, of
course, your mother--"
He smiled again.
"Good old ma! She sure is the best ever. I'd be sorrier for her than I
am if I didn't feel certain that if--that if I go she won't wait long
after me." He swung away from this aspect of his thought to a new one.
"Say, Bob, do you suppose it's a sign that God really is with me--gump
as I am!--that he's sent you to take ma and the girls off my
hands--_you_ know--and make my mind easy?"
They discussed those happenings which might reasonably be held to be
signs of Divine good intention, after which silence fell again. The
guards grunted or yawned; the cards were slapped on the table; the
tricks were pulled in with the scratching of paper against wood. An hour
went by; another hour, and then another. In spite of his efforts to make
himself hard, Teddy felt the tension. Having accidentally touched Bob's
hand, he grasped it with a clutch like a vise. He was still clutching it
when a messenger came to the door to say that the jury was about to
render their verdict and the prisoner must come back into court.
Bob climbed the corkscrew first. A guard followed him, then Teddy, then
the other guard. It was after seven in the evening. The courtroom,
relatively empty, had a sickly look, under crude electric lighting. But
half of the spectators had come back, and only those officials and
lawyers who were obliged to be in their places. All the reporters were
there, watching for every shade in Teddy's face and seeing more than he
expressed.
Bob managed to pass in front of the cage.
"Remember, Teddy--hardness is the big word."
"Sure thing!" Teddy whispered back.
The jury filed in. The judge took his place. Teddy was ordered to stand
up. He stood very straight, his hands in the pockets of his jacket. In
all that met the eye he was a sturdy, stocky young man, pleasing to look
at, and with no suggestion of the criminal. His face was grave with a
gravity beyond that of death, but he showed no sign of nervousness.
If anyone showed nervousness it was the foreman of the jury, a
good-natured fish dealer, with a drooping reddish mustache, who had
never expected to be in this situation. When asked if the jury had
arrived at a verdict his voice trembled as he answered:
"We have."
"What is your verdict?"
"We find the accused guilty of murder."
"Of murder in the first or the second degree?"
"In the first."
That was all. Bob wheeled round toward Teddy, who smiled courageously.
"It's all right, Bob," he whispered, as their hands met over the rail of
the cage. "I've got the right line on it. It's my medicine, and I know
how to take it. Keep ma and the girls from worrying, and I can go
straight through with it."
[Illustration: _"ALL RIGHT, MA! I'M READY!"_]
It was all there was time for. They had not noticed that Stenhouse had
said something about appeal, and the judge something about sentence.
Everyone was leaving. Stenhouse came to shake hands with his client and
tell him that the game wasn't up yet. The boy thanked him. The cage was
unlocked, and once more Teddy, with a guard in front and a guard
following after him, went down the corkscrew stair.