Having no arenas where captive gladiators and martyrs satisfy the public
longing for the sight of bleeding flesh and twitching nerve, the people
of our day flock to the court-rooms for their keenest excitements.
The case of "The People _vs._ Stephen Coburn" had been an intensely
popular entertainment. This day the room was unusually stuffed with men
and women. At the door the officers leaned like buttresses against the
thrust of a solid wall of humanity. Outside, the halls, the stairs, and
the sidewalk were jammed with the mob crushing toward the door for a
sight of the white-haired mother pilloried in the witness-box and
fighting with all her poor wits against the shrewdest, calmest, fiercest
cross-examiner in the State.
In the jury-box the twelve silent prisoners of patience sat in awe of
their responsibilities, a dozen extraordinarily ordinary, conspicuously
average persons condemned to the agony of deciding whether they should
consign a fellow-man to death or release a murderer among their
fellow-men.
Next the judge sat Sarah Coburn, her withered hands clenched bonily in
the lap where, not so many years ago, she had cuddled the babe that was
now the culprit hunted down and abhorred. The mere pressure of his first
finger had sent a soul into eternity and brought the temple of his own
home crashing about his head.
Next the prisoner sat his father, veteran now with the experience that
runs back to the time when the first father and mother found the first
first-born of the world with hands reddened in the blood of the earliest
sacrifice on the altar of Cain.
People railed in the street and in the press against the law's delay
with Stephen Coburn's execution and against the ability of a rich father
to postpone indefinitely the vengeance of justice. Old Coburn had forced
the taxpayers to spend vast sums of money. He had spent vaster sums
himself. The public and the prosecution, his own enormously expensive
lawyers, his son and his very wife, supposed that he still had vast sums
to spend. It was solely his own secret that he had no more. He had built
his fortune as his father had built the stone wall along his fields,
digging each boulder from the ground with his hands, lugging it across
the irregular turf and heaving it to its place. Every dollar of his had
its history of effort, of sweat and ache. And now the whole wall was
gone, carried away in wholesale sweeps as by a landslide.
In his business he had been so shrewd and so close that people had said,
"Old Coburn will fight for five days for five minute's interest on five
cents." When his son's liberty was at stake he signed blank checks, he
told his lawyers to get the best counsel in the nation. He did not ask,
"How much?" He asked, "How good?" Every technical ruse that could be
employed to thwart the prosecution he employed. He bribed everybody
bribable whose silence or speech had value. Dangerous witnesses were
shipped to places whence they could not be summonsed. Blackmailers and
blackguards fattened on his generosity and his fear.
The son, Stephen Coburn, had gone to the city, warm-hearted, young,
venturesome, not vicious, had learned life in a heap, sowed his wild
oats all at once, fallen among evil companions, and drifted by easy
stages into an affair of inexcusable ugliness, whence he seemed unable
to escape till a misplaced chivalry whispered him what to do. He had
found himself like Lancelot with "his honor rooted in dishonor" and
"faith unfaithful kept him falsely true." But Stephen Coburn was no
Lancelot, any more than his siren was a Guinevere or her slain husband a
King Arthur. He was simply a well-meaning, hot-headed, madly enamoured
young fool. The proof of this last was that he took a revolver to his
Gordian knot. Revolvers, as he found too late, do not solve problems.
They make a far-reaching noise, and their messengers cannot be recalled.
His parents had not known the city phase of their son. They had known
the adorable babe he had been, the good boy weeping over a broken-winged
robin tumbled from a nest, running down-stairs in his bare feet for one
more good-night kiss, crying his heart out when he must be sent away to
school, remembering their birthdays and abounding in gentle graces. This
was the Stephen Coburn they had known. They believed it to be the real,
the permanent, Stephen Coburn; the other was but the victim of a
transient demon. They could not believe that their boy would harm the
world again. They could not endure the thought that his repentance and
his atonement should be frustrated by a dishonorable end.
The public knew only the wicked Stephen Coburn. His crime had been his
entrance into fame. All the bad things he had done, all the bad people
he had known, all the bad places he had gone, were searched out and
published by the detectives and the reporters. To blacken Stephen
Coburn's repute so horribly that the jurors would feel it their
inescapable duty to scavenge him from the offended earth, that was the
effort of the prosecution. To prevent that blackening was one of the
most vital and one of the most costly features of the defense. To deny
the murder and tear down the web of circumstantial evidence as fast as
the State could weave it was another.
The Coburn case had become a notorious example of that peculiarly
American institution, the serial trial. The first instalment had ended
in a verdict of guilty. It had been old Coburn's task to hold up his
wife and his son in the collapse of their mad despair, while he managed
and financed the long, slow struggle with the upper courts till he wrung
from them an order for a new trial. This had ended, after weeks of
torment in the court-room and forty-eight hours of almost unbearable
suspense, in a disagreement of the jury. The third trial found the
prosecution more determined than ever, and acquainted with all the
methods of the defense. The only flaw was the loss of an important
witness, "the man across the hall," whom impatient time had carried off
to the place where subpoenas are not respected. His deposition and his
testimony at the previous trials were as lacking in vitality as himself.
And now once more old Coburn must carry everything upon his back, aching
like a world-weary Atlas who dares not shift his burden. But now he was
three years weaker, and he had no more money to squander. His house, his
acres, the cattle upon his hills, his blooded thoroughbreds, his
patriarchal stallions, his town lots, his bank-building, his bonds and
stocks, all were sold, pawned as collateral, or blanketed with
mortgages.
As he had comforted his wife when they had witnessed the bolt from the
blue, so now he sat facing her in her third ordeal. Only now she was not
on the home porch, but in the arena. He could not hold her hands. Now
she dared not close her eyes and cry; it was not the work of one
thunderbolt she had to see. Now, under the darting questions of the
court-examiner, she was like a frightened girl lost in the woods and
groping through a tempest, with lightning thrusts pursuing her on every
side, stitching the woods with fire like the needle in a sewing-machine
stabbing and stabbing at the dodging shuttle.
The old woman had gone down into the pit for her son. She had been led
through the bogs and the sewers of vice. Almost unspeakable, almost
unthinkable wickedness had been taught to her till she had become deeply
versed in the lore that saddens the eyes of the scarlet women of
Babylon. But still her love purified her, and almost sanctified the
strategy she practised, the lies she told, the truths she concealed, the
plots she devised with the uncanny canniness of an old peasant. People
not only felt that it was her duty to fight for her young like a mad
she-wolf, but they would have despised her for any failure of sacrifice.
She sat for hours baffling the inquisitor, foreseeing his wiles by
intuition, evading his masked pitfalls by instinct. She was terribly
afraid of him, yet more afraid of herself, afraid that she would break
down and become a brainless, weeping thing. It was the sincerity of her
fight against this weakness that made her so dangerous to the
prosecuting attorney. He wanted to compel her to admit that her son had
confessed his deed to her. She sought to avoid this admission. She had
not guessed that he was more in dread of her tears than of her guile. He
was gentler with her than her own attorneys had been. At all costs he
felt that he must not succeed too well with her.
The whole trial had become by now as academic as a game of chess, to all
but the lonely, homesick parents. The prosecuting attorney knew that the
mother was not telling the truth; the judge and the jury knew that she
was not telling the truth. But unless this could be geometrically
demonstrated the jury would disregard its own senses. Yet the prosecutor
knew that if he succeeded in trapping the mother too abruptly into any
admission dangerous to her son she would probably break down and cry her
dreary old heart out, and then those twelve superhuman jurors would weep
with her and care for nothing on earth except her consolation.
The crisis came as crises love to come, without warning. The question
had been simple enough, and the tone as gentle as possible: "You have
just stated, Mrs. Coburn, that your son spoke to you in his apartment
the day he is alleged to have committed this act, but I find that at the
first and second trials you testified that you did not see him in his
apartment at all. Which, please, is the correct statement?"
In a flash she realized what she had done. It is so hard to build and
defend a fortress of lies, and she was very old and not very wise, tired
out, confused by the stare of the mob and the knowledge that every word
she uttered endangered the life she had borne. Now she felt that she had
undone everything. She blamed herself for ruining the work of years. She
saw her son led to death because of her blunder. Her answer to the
question and the patient courtesy of the attorney was to throw her hands
into the air, toss her white head to and fro, and give up the battle.
The tears came like a gush of blood from a deep wound; they poured
through the lean fingers she pressed against her gaunt cheeks, and she
shook with the dry, weak weeping of senility and utter desolation. Then
her old arms yearned for him as when a babe.
"I want my boy! I want my boy!"
* * * * *
The judge grew very busy among his papers, the prosecuting attorney
swallowed hard. The jurymen thought no more of evidence and of the
stability of the laws. They all had mothers, or memory-mothers, and they
only resolved that whatever crime Stephen Coburn might have committed,
it would be a more dastardly crime for them to drive their twelve
daggers into the aching breast that had suckled him. On the instant the
trial had resolved itself into "The People _vs._ One Poor Old Mother."
The jury's tears voted for them, and their real verdict was surging up
in one thought:
"This white haired saint wants her boy: he may be a black sheep, but she
wants him, and she shall have him, by--" whatever was each juryman's
favorite oath.
When the judge had finished his charge the jury stumbled on one
another's heels to get to their sanctum. There they reached a verdict so
quickly that, as the saying is, the foreman was coming back into the
court-room before the twelfth man was out of it. Amazed at their own
unanimity, they were properly ashamed, each of the other eleven, for
their mawkish weakness, and their treachery to the stern requirements of
higher citizenship. But they went home not entirely unconsoled by the
old woman's cry of beatitude at that phrase, "Not Guilty."
She went among them sobbing with ecstasy, and her tears splashed their
hands like holy water. It was all outrageously illegal, and sentimental,
and harmful to the sanctity of the law. And yet, is it entirely
desirable that men should ever grow unmindful of the tears of old
mothers?