Judge Mann followed Joe Bass to the elevator that clanked them gravely
to the relative holiness of the sixth floor, where Mann's chambers
occupied a corner with a north view. The windows were dark, under a
windy spatter of unexpected rain. Mann glimpsed gold blurs of downtown
windows, white hurry of headlights, a flow of them two blocks away at
the corner of Main and Court, Winchester going home to suburban
bedrooms. "Nasty night," said Joe Bass. The red eye closed, the green
eye opened; a file of wet bugs poured up the Court Street hill. "Going
home directly, sir?"
"I think so. You were in court, weren't you, Joe?"
"Yes. I ducked out before the end of Mr. Hunter's speech. Did Mr. Warner
waive the opening?"
"More or less...." Joe Bass never hovered, or clucked. A sure instinct
had told him Judge Mann preferred to light his own cigarettes. But he
did not like to be dismissed before the Judge went home, preferring to
read or meditate in the anteroom until any hour of the night. He had not
much to go home to--a boarding-house bedroom uptown, his wife dead,
children married and gone. "I wish Mr. Warner would cut down that belly.
Too much work for the heart at sixty-eight."
"Sixty-eight, Judge?--I hadn't realized." Joe chuckled faintly in the
shadows. "I'm sixty-seven. Apropos of old age, I took the liberty of
browsing through your Thucydides a while ago--have the same paperback
edition at home, and very good, I'd say--may I?" He was already drifting
to the bookshelves. For Joe, there was always a quotation. It seemed to
Judge Mann that this was at least the magpie instinct at its noblest,
for Joe did not gather them as random bright beads, but for personal use
and to be shared. "It's from a speech of Pericles at the funeral of
those who first died in the war--and I wonder sometimes if the
Peloponnesian War wasn't as great a disaster as the latest? If the
Greece of Pericles could have survived--well.... Here it is: 'As for
those of you who are too old to have children, I would ask you to count
as gain the greater part of your life, in which you have been happy, and
remember that what remains is not long, and let your hearts be lifted up
at the thought of the fair fame of the dead. One's sense of honor is
the only thing that does not grow old.'"
Judge Mann thought: What of one who dies young?--a child hit by a car?
Ann Doherty? What of one who dies young by act of the State, with no
fair fame? "I think, Joe, we've become a more complex people."
"Aren't the essentials much the same?"
"Not quite. I think there's even a new humanitarianism, new in the last
hundred and fifty years. In the time of, say, Edmund Burke, there was
still officially approved slavery even in England, where they got rid of
it before we did. Hangings as public entertainments. Cats burnt alive
for fun on Guy Fawkes Day. The modern stomach pukes up that sort of
thing. Alongside the mushroom cloud, the decade of insanity that was
Hitler's bloom, the damned impersonal devices for butchering unseen
millions by throwing a switch, you try setting up the way people
actually live, or try to live, from day to day: there's a difference. If
the difference means as much as I think it does, if we get through
another hundred years without blowing up the planet, modern medicine
should have a great share of the credit." Joe looked puzzled. "In a time
when any bad sickness or injury was probably a death sentence, a general
fatalism would be almost unavoidable, don't you think?"
"Mm, yes."
"Cruelty and beastliness got taken for granted. If we value life more
now, it's because we know more about maintaining it and reducing its
miseries. It doesn't have to be 'nasty, brutish and short.'"
"'One's sense of honor'--I liked that part."
"Other things don't grow old. Knowledge. What you learned as a child is
with you at sixty-seven. Some kinds of love remain young, so long as the
body can support our curious brains where love is born."
2
It is extraordinary that a system hoary with age, extravagant and
wasteful to the highest degree, should not be supplanted by some
method of getting at facts directly, and having them passed on by
men who understand the controversies that they seek to solve.