He sat down, and I saw him no more; but I had no time to regret him,
for his place was instantly occupied by a person who stepped within the
bar from the audience. I had already noticed him coming in and going
out of the court-room, apparently under strong excitement, and hovering
about, now among the gentlemen of the bar, and now among friends in
the audience. He had an excited and eccentric look, and yet he looked
like a gentleman--a gentleman in distress of mind; I had supposed that
he could not be one of the criminal classes, or he would scarcely have
been allowed so much at large. At the same time that he took his place
he was confronted from the other end of the long table by a person whom
I will call a lady, because I observed that every one else did so.
This lady’s person tended to fat; she had a large, red face, and I
learned without surprise that she was a cook. She wore a crimson shawl,
and a bonnet abounding in blossoms and vegetables of striking colors,
and she had one arm, between the wrist and elbow, impressively swathed
in linen; she caressed, as it were, a small water-pitcher, which I
felt, in spite of its ordinary appearance, was somehow historical. In
fact, it came out that this pitcher played an important part in the
assault which the lady accused the gentleman at the other end of the
table of committing upon her.
It seemed from her story that the gentleman was a boarder in the house
where she was cook, and that he was in the habit of intruding upon her
in the kitchen against her will and express command. A week before (I
understood that she had spent the intervening time in suffering and
disability) she had ordered him out, and he had turned furiously upon
her with an uplifted chair and struck her on the arm with it, and then
had thrown at her head the pitcher which she now held in her hands.
There were other circumstances of outrage, which I cannot now recall,
but they are not important in view of the leading facts.
Further testimony in behalf of the plaintiff was offered by another
lady, whose countenance expressed second-girl as unmistakably as that
of the plaintiff expressed cook. She was of the dish-faced Irish type,
and whereas the cook was of an Old-World robustness, her witness had
the pallor and flat-chestedness of the women of her race who are born
in America; she preferred several shades of blue in her costume, which
was of ready-made and marked-down effect. This lady with difficulty
comprehended the questions intended to elicit her name and the fact
of her acquaintance with the plaintiff, and I noticed a like density
of understanding in most of the other persons testifying or arraigned
in this court. In fact, I came to wonder if the thick-headedness of
average uneducated people was not much greater than I had hitherto
suspected, in my easy optimism. It was certainly inconceivable why,
with intelligence enough to come in when it rained, the cook should
have summoned this witness. She testified at once that she had not
seen the assault, and did not know that the cook had been hurt; and no
prompting of the plaintiff’s counsel could inspire her with a better
recollection. In the hands of the defendant’s lawyer she developed the
fact that his client was reputed a quiet, inoffensive boarder, and
that she never knew of any displeasures between him and the cook.
“Did you ever see this lady intoxicated?” inquired the lawyer.
The witness reflected. “I don’t understand you,” she answered, finally.
“Have you ever known her to be overcome by drink?”
The witness considered this point also, and in due time gave it up, and
turned a face of blank appeal upon the judge, who came to her rescue.
“Does she drink,--drink liquor? Does she get drunk?”
“_Oh!_ Oh, yes; she’s tipsy sometimes.”
“Was she tipsy,” asked the lawyer, “on the day of the alleged assault?”
The witness again turned to the magistrate for help.
“Was she tipsy on the day when she says this gentleman struck her with
a chair, and threw the pitcher at her head?”
“Yes, sir,” replied the witness, “she was.”
“Was she very tipsy?” the lawyer pursued.
The witness was equal to this question. “Well, yes, sir, she was. Any
way, she hadn’t left anything in the bottle on her bureau.”
“When did you see the bottle full?”
“The night before. Or in the evening. She commenced drinking in the
night.”
“What was in the bottle?”
“A pint of whiskey.”
“That will do,” said the lawyer.
The witness stepped down, and genteelly resumed her place near the
plaintiff. Neither of the ladies changed countenance, or seemed in any
wise aware that the testimony just given had been detrimental to the
plaintiff’s cause. They talked pleasantly together, and were presently
alike interested in the testimony of a witness to the defendant’s good
character. He testified that the defendant was a notoriously peaceable
person, who was in some sort of scientific employment, but where or
what I could not make out; he was a college graduate, and it was quite
unimaginable to the witness that he should be the object of this sort
of charge.
When the witness stood aside, the defendant was allowed to testify in
his own behalf, which he did with great energy. He provided himself
with a chair, and when he came to the question of the assault he
dramatized the scene with appropriate action. He described with
vividness the relative positions of himself and the cook when, on the
day given, he went into the kitchen to see if the landlady were there,
and was ordered out by her. “She didn’t give me time to go, but caught
up a chair, and came at me, thus!” Here he represented with the chair
in his hand an assault that made the reporters, who sat near him,
quail before the violence of the mere dumb-show. “I caught the rung
of the chair in my hand, thus, and instinctively pushed it, thus. I
suppose,” he added, in diction of memorable elegance, “that the impact
of the chair in falling back against her wrist may have produced the
contusions of which she complains.”
The judge and the bar smiled; the audience, not understanding, looked
serious.
“And what,” said the judge, “about throwing the pitcher at her?”
“I never saw the pitcher, your honor, till I saw it in court. I threw
no pitcher at her, but retreated from the kitchen as quickly as
possible.”
“That will do,” said the judge. The plaintiff’s counsel did the
best that could be done for no case at all in a brief argument. The
judge heard him patiently, and then quietly remarked, “The charge is
dismissed. The defendant is discharged. Call the next case.”
The plaintiff had probably imagined that the affair was going in her
favor. She evidently required the explanation of her counsel that it
had gone against her, and all was over; for she looked at the judge in
some surprise, before she turned and walked out of the court-room with
quiet dignity, still caressing her pitcher, and amicably accompanied by
the other lady, her damaging witness.