Judge Mann watched Cecil Warner approach the witness chair like an old
bull: heavy step, flaring nostrils, lowered head, eyes communicating
nothing but a brooding truculence. He halted ponderously, an old bull
arriving at the dubious barrier of a fence, and--just stood there. Judge
Mann's pencil drifted across the scratch pad in a rapid script not much
like his normal writing:
Forgive me this my virtue;
For in the fatness of these pursy times
Virtue itself of vice must pardon beg,
Yea, curb and woo for leave to do him good.
He grew fully aware of the writing with a partly pleased astonishment:
almost a true dissociation. His brother Jack might be interested; he
would save the page. It must have been three years since he had last
read _Hamlet_.
He understood also, waiting out the darkness of Warner's silence, how
his own self might become a battleground. Why fool himself? It had
already become one. The deeper occasions of the battle, the relative
wrong and right, his true position within it, not clear. _More light!_
He had been assuming two nights ago, and less certainly last night, a
mental clarity he had not yet won. Then look at it this way: the
assumption had been a folly and a vanity and a failure in
self-appraisal; therefore dismiss it. Accept for the moment simply the
fact of inner conflict; and then what? His pencil hand stirred and
advanced:
Sit you down,
And let me wring your heart: for so I shall,
If it be made of penetrable stuff....
The conflict itself was no illusion. He could oblige his mind to draw
somewhat apart and provide illusive imagery for what was no illusion; an
imagery, sharp enough, from happenings fourteen years ago that had been
(in their time) no illusion. Northern Luzon, 1945: all they'd done that
night was drop a few daisy-cutters. Why should he remember that night
and not some of the livelier ones? Perhaps because his mind had been
rather detached then too, his body not much scared, not much concerned.
A darkened earth, flares, smoky glimpses more deceiving than dark,
thunder of .75's and mad red flight of tracers; long drone overhead of
the angry bug evading crossed searchlight swords, or trying to--too high
for flak; we hadn't got the poor bastard. And a sudden sense in
Sergeant Terence Mann of the medics, who shortly before had been annoyed
mostly at the interruption of a poker game with himself three bucks
ahead, of the humanly vast forces involved, the courage and hate and
fear and death and love with which the stars are not concerned at all.
Trying for the supply dump near Dagupan, all Joe had got was the
backside of a church and two buffalos. Above, behind, including all, a
sense of the flow of time that renders every victory and every defeat a
part of eternity. And every moment of compromise ...
"Miss Welsh, were you with the Chalmers family in 1951 when Dr. Herbert
Chalmers married Victoria Johnson Blake?"
"Yes."
"Did you attend the wedding?"
"I did." She was biting her words now, not chattering.
"In what month were they married?"
"July."
"When did you first meet the defendant, Callista Blake?"
"Guess it was August that year, 1951." Warner studied his shoes. "Well,
I _know_ it was, because C'lista was away in girls' camp while they went
on a honeymoon, me with the house on my hands--" she clamped her mouth
shut, glaring. Mann found it possible to be sorry for the woman.
Warner's massive pauses were tough on any witness.
Warner said at last, mildly: "Thank you." The back row idiot briefly
giggled. "Callista was not present at her mother's wedding?"
"Certainly wasn't."
"Why 'certainly,' Miss Welsh? She was eleven that year."
"Because you never knew when she'd throw a tantrum."
"You consider that unhappy children should not have tantrums?"