EXPLOSIVE DUST
Every place has its own peculiar odor, from the flower and candle-smoke
scent of a graceful woman's sitting-room to the tarry ropes and
fish-net and canvas sails of a boat-house; from the dried earth,
rustling bulb and flower-seed smell of a tool bin to the paint tubes
and mustiness of old draperies and cigarette smoke of an atelier.
Sunning mattresses, hot milk bottles, warming squares and talcum
powders, the delicious smell of bathed baby flesh; scent of wooden pews
and velvet cushions, camphored furs and stale incense of a church:
every department of life, every living thing, has its haunting,
significant odor.
A country court-room smells of unaired dust, of wet umbrellas and muddy
rubbers, of onlookers who have handled horses and gasoline, of doctors
who have come from operations. Smells of the coarse perfumes of the
criminal's lady friends, the bay rum of the shining country lawyer,
lemon peel and cloves chewed by such persons as even in the most
stringent times of the Volstead Act appear always to have something to
conceal.
When the man-of-straw of outraged community virtue is dislodged the
court-room is redolent of prejudice and policy and pedantry and
plausibility; of many things that lie on each other in layers like
morning griddle cakes. But it seldom suggests atmosphere of health
and light and true cleanliness and earnest religious progressiveness;
of the earnest desire to administer true justice, of the earnest wish
to analyze specific examples of crime, to conserve all goodness, to
see straighter, more freely, with greater charity and more modern
scientific accuracy. Of these things few court-rooms smell.
It may have been the stale, dreary, intrenched and pompous atmosphere
of the Trout County court-room that finally drove the Minga Bunch from
their original intention of following Terence O'Brien to the last ditch
of his trial. Youthful enthusiasm and curiosity had long since died
out, leaving only a grudging sense of clan obligation, and the long
hours of reviewing circumstantial evidence, the cross-questioning of
this and that dull witness, the peering faces of the family of the
murdered man and the grim and relentless attitude of the jury, these
things had somehow robbed the circumstances of all their dramatic
values. The sight of Terry standing day after day in the pen, his
tow-colored hair always brushed the same way, his eyes always nervously
blinking the same way, and his dry mouth unable to testify in his
own defense, nettled the group of young people who had interested
themselves in his behalf. They had supposed the young accused would
rise suddenly and pelt the people with polemics. They had looked for
dynamics; they found only musty, fusty technique, sour looks of old
men, rigidities of convention and a bewildered effect of vital issues
lost in a grand tea-party of form and precedent.
Also, Watts Shipman disappointed them. Not experienced enough to
comprehend the poise and power that lay behind Shipman's calm, his
deferential giving way to his "distinguished opponent," his punctilious
observance of every known courtesy and tradition of the bar, they found
him tepid and unconvincing. They saw their great man as rather a simple
soul, apparently a negligible factor in the trial, apparently dominated
by the sleek, shining country counsel for the prosecution, and did not
know that those very simplicities were the earnest of his greatness.
The Bunch did not know the modern function of the lawyer to hold
himself rigidly from emphasis until all of the case has been digested.
To work out by the slow sifting of evidence the four sides of his
construction, the meticulous dotting of _I's_ and crossing of _T's_,
the subterfuge of the trained, technical response of witness when asked
certain specific questions; in short, the suave chicanery and subtle
craft that has been slowly built up around the narrowing arena where
two brains tourney for the life or honor of a prisoner--these things
were so much mortification of the flesh for the restive "Bunch."
One by one the slow summer mornings of the trial dragged out. One by
one the "Bunch" dwindled down. Dora, trim in costume, desperate in eyes
and manner, might have noticed this defection; Sard, rather listless
and weary, saw it with scorn; Shipman, a slight glimmer in his eyes,
observed it. But Minga and Dunstan, coming religiously together every
day, both noted and registered it.
These two young people sat solemnly aloof in some communion of spirit,
waiting for some revelation, what, they hardly knew. But to an
imaginative onlooker they might have seemed slowly in their young hope
to dim; their vaulting belief might have appeared to such an onlooker
to become slowly filmed over by the long, long dust and dinginess, the
hanging cobwebs, the old parchments and papers, the pomps and vanities,
the emptiness and scaly dead skin of the Law.
But Dust is capable of explosion, and the two youngsters solemnly
sitting there on the last day of the case gradually felt themselves
slow fuses in some strange emotional bomb of their own planning.
This was somewhat heightened by a note that Dunstan carried in his
pocket. Once during the trial the lad took this out and showed it to
his companion; the two heads bent over it, two brown hands clasped in
solemn vow. Two solemn pairs of young eyes swore some consecration to a
so far half-planned venture.
Minga seemed restless and scornful. She kept her eyes on the
proceedings with the air of one who should say, "And this is what you
call 'justice'!"
At last came the summing up for the defense, and the great lawyer rose
and made his plea for the youth, who, sullen of eyes and unbelieving of
spirit, sat there. The court-room was full. Watts' fame had been passed
from mouth to mouth among the Trout County inhabitants and all up and
down the little villages of the Hudson the lawyer's mission had been
told. Private automobiles bumped along the country roads, jitneys from
the ferries and from other counties deposited their loads of citizens.
The country people, secure in their sense of collective virtue,
untroubled with modern analyses of crime and punishment, unhampered
with any passion for an adjustment of punishment to environment and
education, and keen for the Roman Holiday, came to see severe sentence
of imprisonment passed upon one who had forfeited his right to live
among them. The jury, clean as to shave, ostentatious as to watch
chain, some perfumed, some begoggled, one in hip boots, another in
pearl spats, all with an expression of wisdom and virtue rather droll
to anyone who knew the hidden chapters of their separate lives; in
fact, the Spoon River Anthology, numbering twelve picked verses,
filed into the jury box, and "twelve good men and true" mopped their
foreheads and tried to look unconscious.
Outside, the summer morning was rich with promise. Butterflies sailed
two and two past the branches and down into the deep grass. The leaves,
turning over like little green babies on their backs, warmed their
little stomachs in the sun.
The summing up was short. Terry, his half-formed young ears pricking
up, heard it, only half understanding. Sard, Dunstan and Minga heard it
rebelliously. Dora, like a person in a trance, heard it stonily.
The criminal had done murder, so the evidence had shown, to obtain
money for adventure and to further schemes for his advancement. No
motive of personal hatred or self-defense or vengeance could be found.
The testimony had been full, accurate and to the point. Terry's curly,
well-brushed head was on his chest. Later it was raised and the boy was
staring defiantly around him like a young bull at bay and desperately
knowing only one thing, how joyous, how magnificent it would be to
charge!
Sard, sitting back in the court-room, looked from the boy, all the
muscles of his young back taut, to her father. It was to her suddenly
as if the whole court-room, all of them were, under the Judge's power
of punishment, and that somehow his whole life, all the whetted flavor
of his existence was to mete punishment. To the girl's daunted eyes,
her father was as powerful here as he was at the breakfast table. The
gray head was pompous and rawly defined against the background of the
American flag; the hard-boiled eyes looked with a peculiar fixity,
a muscular invariability on every witness; the nasal voice with its
few comments, swift interruption and rebuke, its lifeless adjustments
and refereeship of the proceedings were of an inflexible quality that
the girl felt was not of convention but of a hard, unimaginative,
self-secure and characteristic conceit.
So that when the counsel for the defense rose, three young hearts
in the assemblage arose with him. Yet to their passionate wish,
Watts seemed, standing in the court-room here, to fall short. The
distinguished figure, the face tanned with a summer of outdoor work and
horseback riding, sobered with long, lonely vigils of thought, had, it
seemed, great respect for this country court-room, for its judiciary,
for the foreman of the jury and for his opponent in the matter of the
trial. Watts carried himself like a man who had been impressed by the
firmness and sobriety of the proceedings. The lawyer let the court-room
know that he had had many personal talks with the prisoner. It was his
skilful way of assuring them that they shared his passion for reforms.
Terry's head lifted, looking at him curiously. The young fellow
remembered revelations, tears, of one night in particular when Watts
had stayed with him until dawn came and his hysteria was over. The boy
wondered what his friend would reveal of this. But the great lawyer
went calmly on with unemotional emphasis to state that he had found the
criminal's mind vague, perhaps not properly educated, unformed and in
ignorance of the many physical facts that at his age induce crime.
"And we know," remarked the speaker calmly, "that there is an age in
young manhood when a youth is hardly responsible. The law, I feel,
should invariably in its adjustments reckon with the physiological fact
of that age. He had," he said, "talked with the prisoner as he would
have liked to be given the wisdom at crises to talk to a son of his
own, and as"--here the man looked about the court-room into the rows of
dull and complacent faces--"it seems to me it is absolutely incumbent
on all of us to talk to sons and daughters of our own frankly, giving
them truth and the clear analysis of all that makes in our bodies and
environment and heritage for crime; for sins against ourselves and the
body politic."
The lawyer then reviewed some mitigating circumstances, touched
lightly on some of the more interesting technical aspects of the case
and addressed the jury on behalf of the commutation of the sentence.
Finally, with curious simple tenderness, a thing that the court-room
did not understand, at which Judge Bogart looked displeased and drummed
impatiently with his fingers, at which the country lawyers openly
squirmed and yawned, but at which Dora sat tense and straight, and
Terry's young head went down into his arms, he finished.
"If, Gentlemen of the Jury, you should still feel that you must bring
in the verdict of intentional and deliberate guilt, then I appeal,
your Honor, for the commutation of sentence. I appeal in the name of
Humanity, of struggling, sinning, ignorant Humanity, and by that new
spirit which makes us disbelieve nowadays in the 'pound of flesh.'
I appeal, your Honor, by my own youth's ignorance, its mistakes and
struggles and by the ignorances and mistakes and struggles of those
I have tried to help; by yours, Gentlemen of the Jury, who take your
solemn part in the decision after the trial. I appeal to Terence
O'Brien, the accused, to take your decision, whatever it may be, and
apply it as a test of his own character and what he may still make of
that character; and I appeal to his sister, sitting there, to make
her grief and sorrow noble, a test by which she may grow stronger and
braver.
"I appeal," said Watts, looking down toward his three young friends who
sat with hot cheeks watching him, "to all intelligence and sweetness
and honesty of women, all strength and cleanness and courage of men to
help Terence O'Brien and all such as he. I ask, your Honor, that his
sentence may be mitigated, so that he may finally go back to a world
acknowledged the better by his punishment, and be received by the world
with respect and helpfulness. I ask these things," said the lawyer
in a low voice, "as I know my own human soul and its potentialities,
as I know yours, sir," turning to the prosecutor, "as I know yours,
gentlemen," turning to the somewhat confused jury, "and as I know
yours," with a half smile at the unimaginative audience eyeing him.
"For we are all somewhere, sometime, through some guilt or ignorance or
weakness and mistake, guilty of punishable things. That is why we must
forever demand of our Law that it shall be administrated with hope,
must forever inculcate and advocate the higher, healthier judgments of
analysis, understanding, temperance and mercy. There is no glory in
punishing predestined guilt; there is glory in shielding and protecting
potential criminals from guilt."
The speech fell painfully flat, as Watts must have known it would.
It left the court-room cold. These country people, trained to the
less analytical, more emotional attitude toward crime and punishment,
felt somehow defrauded. The great lawyer had robbed them of their
Roman Holiday, of the raging and tearing oratory to which by his very
greatness they felt they were entitled. There is an unconquerable love
among the half-baked for flourishes and figures, for verbal fireworks
and Mosaic utterances. No country audience feels that it has been
fairly dealt with in a criminal trial unless it has been seized roughly
by the orator and dragged willingly over the entire gamut of the
prisoner's shame, contrition, despair, rage, vindictiveness, and given
a delicious peep at the unspeakable and the unprintable.
The rest was technical. The judge dryly charged the jury, commending,
coldly, a consideration for the youth of the prisoner. The jury filed
out; the crowd filtered forth.
Minga and Dunstan leaped from their seats and fled forth under the
trees. Minga's small face was pale. She stood staring unseeingly at the
crowds straggling out of the little country court-house of Trout County.
People were already settling down with lunch boxes or hurrying away
to eat before the jury should return. It was prophesied from mouth to
mouth that the jury would not be "out" long. Groups standing about
discussed the case with relish. The comments were bald, stereotyped
and pharisaical. The tiresome, assumed impeccability of this crowd
discussing one boy's misdoings got on Minga's nerves. Who were these
people, some of them mean of face, too evidently underhand, tricky
and foul-mouthed, to condemn a boy, only twenty, who had had them for
example and no mature chance to estimate the essential stuff of life?
The girl, with unreasoning resentment and little understanding of the
enormous values of the collective sense of equity, watched Judge Bogart
with slow pomp, making formal gestures of greeting and dismissal. She
saw the two lawyers exchanging deprecating amenities, and wanted to
laugh. What a play it all was! What mummery!
She watched Sard talking to Shipman and her heart was hot with rage as
the two exchanged what seemed to her inadequate remarks.
"How's Winged Victory?"
Sard's hands went eagerly out.
"I'm still thinking of your speech. It's what I've always wanted to
say--to have said."
"You didn't exact more pyrotechnics!" He met her glance quizzically.
"Ah," the girl breathed, "you spoke to their intelligences, not to
their emotions. You made people think!"
"Did I?" Smiling doubtfully.
"Oh, it must do some good!" she insisted. "It must influence them some
way or other, if not for Terry"--the young, hopeful face clouded, "then
for someone else. Colter says----" The girl hesitated then went on
quickly, "You made them use their minds, you showed the relation of
society to crime; they saw that they were guilty of the Terrys of this
world!"
Lovely in her enthusiasm she added, "I was watching. Old Mr. Fetherfew
wiped his eyes and the garage man coughed, and that young drug clerk
looked so curious and interested. More young people looked interested
than old ones," said Sard rather acutely. "I think that some of them
really understood what you meant."
"You're too encouraging." Watts, smiling, stood with one foot on the
runner of her car. He was noting the traces of worry on the girl's
face. His good news, that he believed the jury would bring in a
modified verdict and Terry's sentence would not necessarily be for
life, had not changed this look of worry. He had seen Sard hesitate and
flush consciously after that arrested "Colter says."
Shipman had had his mind upon this girl and her problem ever since the
club dance. So Sard's little world had already "made her ashamed." It
had, with its tawdry assumption, already begun to pass judgment upon
her. These were the things that sent young people running amuck. What
chance was there in a community like this for the fine idealisms of
youth? Shipman thought. How much more stringent and vindictive are the
unwritten laws of so-called society against the bold spirit that seeks
to transcend it than the concise preventive inhibitions of the state
statute.
Watts had heard rumors of the Tawny Troop canard and of the general
village interpretation of Colter's presence in this girl's vicinity.
How commonplace, how vulgar it was; how it could hurt her!
The seasoned man winced at the thought of that pure spirit smirched
with the stupid and bestial mouthings of the ordinary community. He
shrank to think of his Winged Victory before the essential squalidness
of the minds with which she was surrounded. But he asked no questions,
he only looked thoughtfully into the resolute fresh eyes, and there he
seemed to read a page newly turned in Sard's heart.
This girl, he saw, was slowly growing conscious about the man, Colter.
Jove, it was a pity! But with the buzzings of the country community
and her father's cold isolation from the problem there could be only
one result: she would grow more and more sure of this one personality
whose cause she had espoused. That was the way her kind met what it
had to meet. Watts thought of what things Sard might have to meet. His
dark eyes tried to read hers. "Courage!" they said to her, and again,
"Courage!"
"The Minga Group deserted, after all," the lawyer teased. "A little
inharmony there, I'm afraid." Then, as he saw two young figures
morosely eating sandwiches under the shade of an elm, he went forward.
"Well, worshipful clients----"
The lawyer was anxious to get Minga past all shyness and some painful
memories. There was nothing in his face but the look of one who greets
an old comrade.
"How am I to spend my ill-gotten gains?" The man asked it with
purposeful lightness. "There's about three hundred dollars that you
contributed; shall we give it to Dora?"
The two faces darkened. Minga threw away her sandwich. She turned
and faced him, impudently looking him up and down. Her dark blue
eyes glittered with a cold dislike that almost startled the man.
He regarded her with puzzled concern, amazed at the variability of
this little creature whom he had already seen under so many different
phases of emotion. Now, Watts thought, Minga looked really dangerous;
something was added to her usual rebelliousness.
"Oh," said the girl flippantly, "let's do something for Dora by all
means, buy her a grand piano."
He did not answer. She went on bitterly: "That will make _you_ more
comfortable anyway."
"I've disappointed you?" the man questioned gently. Then trying again
for lightness, "I was not worthy of my hire."
"Ah," with quick dislike, "disappointed us? You've been treacherous to
us."
He was quiet, waiting to hear what she had further to say.
"With your power," contemptuously, "with your prestige, to just talk,
to sermonize and philosophize and make no appeal for him, for Terry.
Oh," said the girl excitedly, "it was like going past a drowning person
in a boat, telling all the while how to make the boat safer for all the
safe people, letting the person drown----" She caught her breath with a
sob.
Sard and Dunstan looked wonderingly on this sudden eloquence. It was
not Minga's way to vibrate to the sorrow of the under-dog. Only Watts'
shrewd brain guessed at the emotions that underlay the girl's present
scorn. The trained eyes perceived what was the dynamo that augmented
this passion. With something very tender in the gesture he tried to
take Minga's hand but she swerved from him.
She did not, however, abandon the discussion, and Dunstan, his lace
masked and suspicious, stood back of her. The youth scowled as Shipman
asked slowly, "If you had what you call my power, just what would you
do? Open all the prisons and turn out all the criminals? Use it to
protect one poor lad or to protect many lads and old men and women and
children? Do you know that Terry's mind is psychologically the kind of
mind that naturally resorts to violence to get what it wants?"
"But you have never believed that Terry would be pardoned or you might
have gotten pardon, or a fine, or something," vaguely. "That was what
we wanted. You never really tried!" the girl passionately insisted.
"Nothing that you have said this morning but acknowledged that you
believed him guilty. You didn't insist on his having another chance!"
The man standing there bareheaded, the lines strong on his kind face,
his dark, white dappled head conspicuous under the low hanging elm
branches, looked wonderingly at her, seeing the tears cloud her eyes.
He longed, as he had longed before, to meet this defiant little spirit
with a passion of tenderness, yet an old discipline controlled him.
With his sober grasp of life he sought to help her.
"You mean," the lawyer said slowly, "that I have never believed him
guiltless! No, I haven't; we all heard his guilt proved. You expected
him to be freed because of his youth; you thought that possible. I
never did. Child," said the man, "there is always punishment for
wrong-doing; it is automatic. Whether it comes of the courts or of
life, it comes! Don't you realize that even a life-sentence might be
merciful; a deterrent, to keep Terry from the worse crimes to which his
inheritance and environment might lead him? Try to have patience!"
Shipman held out his hand; he tried to make her meet his eyes. He laid
the power of his spirit on her. "You want better, more intelligent
human laws, more enlightened justice," he said gravely; "so do I. But,
do you know how best to get freedom and justice for all peoples----? By
obeying such law as there is!"
Watts smiled at them, shaking his head. "Oh, I know it's a slow way, a
tedious way, a tame way, but unless we all want to stay forever 'under
the law' with all the slavery and lack of progress that connotes,
we must be better disciplined, better educated and more intelligent
people. We must stay 'under the law' until slowly and painfully and all
together we shall come to a consciousness of more Christian and more
intelligent laws to which we can all subscribe."
Minga drove her hands into her front pockets.
"I want justice," said the girl, crisply.
"So do I," was the lawyer's prompt reply. "I want it, but I seldom see
it."
"I want the justice that would give Terry another chance."
"I want justice for the old cobbler whom Terry killed."
He considered her. "There's only just one way to keep the Terrys of the
world out of jail."
She faced him, held by his magnetism, yet unbelieving. Watts dominated
her as he had that night on the mountain. "Just by being better men
and women ourselves. The criminal is the man or woman who analyzes and
defies society, and in some cases his arraignment of society is just."
Then, with a voice that thrilled with conviction, Shipman said to them:
"Never lose your passion for justice, for the under-dog; never cease
hating smug, secure, complacent things, and never relax in your efforts
to be more intelligent men and women. I am willing to grant you that
there can be no essential justice in life as long as there is no proper
understanding of Terry's temptations, his mental and bodily defects. To
that extent we, as much as he, are to blame for his crime and we must
never cease to agonize for him and for such as he. It is our duty to
raise ourselves through education and our civilized dreams of justice
to enact laws that shall protect all the Terrys from themselves, give
them safety against their wayward impulses; understanding of the
disease of their crime; until that time comes," finished Watts, "we are
all under the law."
It was with a wistfulness the others could not understand that the man
said these things. Manfully, he tried to curb this young despair while
he gloried in and respected it. Some day Watts knew they would forget
this noble passion. They, like him, would grow old, mature in worldly
wisdom, willing to throw much into the terrible human discard, where
so much youth, beauty, hope and honor die in order that the artificial
fabric, called society, may be statically preserved!
Minga turned to Dunstan. "Then Terry," she said under her breath, "has
no friends but us." The two looked at each other meaningly. They turned
slowly toward their roadster. They sprang in; the long shape backed and
snorted and left an angry trail of dust on the summer highway.