II

Weariness had grown like an external pressure, the encroachment of a

rising tide, the waters of darkness. Callista had supposed that when

Cecil walked over there to cross-examine the tide might recede, even

release her entirely. It had not, not entirely, but it might be no

longer rising; maybe this was the turn. She had heard Cecil speak, and

had listened. Listening, she had felt within the weariness that hint of

inarticulate continuing surprise which is an element in any

manifestation of love. It did not seem to her that she had actually

understood what he said, or what the Sergeant said. "Ann Doherty--killed

herself." _What?_ Oh--he was repeating what poor Herb had said to him.

Herb could always be trusted to say something idiotic.

_Important as testimony?--nobody thinks she killed herself._ But the

tide might very well be turning. Her eyes were no longer blurred. She

could discover the thousand crow's-foot wrinkles in Cecil's face over

yonder. Callista understood that she would not faint, nor collapse, nor

die for some little time to come.

Threescore and ten is also a short time. Long enough to wear down a

rugged boy's splendor to a burden of exhausted flesh--Cecil must have

been a magnificent youth. Hardly long enough (Edith suggested once) to

comprehend the pattern of a May-fly's wing, since for that you'd have to

comprehend the protein molecule. When we can do that, Edith said, we

shall still be ignorant, learning all new things with reluctance,

initial rejection, stubborn retention of obsolete notions,

superstitions, cruelties. Maybe, Edith said, the sickly bromide "at the

last analysis" is the most arrogant verbalism human beings ever slung

together.

_What?_ Cecil's voice had spoken something more. With effort and a

little panic, Callista recaptured it out of the counterpoint of thought.

It was very simple. He said: "No further questions."

Edith had gone on to wonder how the coming centuries would handle their

heretics. Burn and hang them like the seventeenth and earlier centuries?

Listen to them a little, unwillingly, like the nineteenth, until

revolution stiffened into respectability, congealed in half-truths? Wall

them off, like the twentieth, with the soft barrier of democratic

smugness or a steel barrier such as Marxian demonology? Maybe, Edith

grumbled, the twenty-first century would return to punishing dissenters

with open savagery: they'd be locked in delightful rooms with plastic

food dispensers, ingenious mechanical attention to all the body's other

needs (sure, all of 'em) and not a God-damned thing to do except watch

television.

Cecil was coming back to her.

Cecil would agree with Edith; and in agreeing would not remind her how

much farther his own life had ranged within the threescore and ten, how

much of wonder and experience, speculation, pleasure, suffering had

burgeoned in him during the half-century that spread between his age and

her own: for he was kind.

Surely if now she cautiously turned her eyes toward the wall clock, the

hands would have struggled a little nearer to five. The Old Man was

sitting down by her, covering her hand briefly, his own heavy and hot.

The clock hands had pushed a small weary way beyond two. "Are you all

right, Cal? You don't look good."

"I'm all right. What's happening now?"

"Looks as if T.J. was going to try a bit of redirect. Sore too. Nothing

makes a prosecutor madder than an impartial policeman."

To Callista the suave gentleman in the gray suit didn't look mad.

"Sergeant, when you first saw Dr. Chalmers he was in a state of shock?"

"He appeared so. Color and breathing bad. Spoke brokenly, with

difficulty. And as I said, later he mentioned a heart condition."

"In other words he was in a state where you'd hardly expect him to make

a clear interpretation of anything he'd seen?"

"I can't answer that, sir, because I've noticed some people can think

pretty straight in spite of a bad shock. I don't know Dr. Chalmers well

enough to say whether he could or not."

She heard the Old Man exclaim under his breath: "Brother! good thing I

didn't bother to object." But after Hunter's leading question Callista

had seen the smooth jowls of juror Emma Beales bobbing with

gratification at the way nice Mr. Hunter had gone straight to the point.

"Has Dr. Chalmers, in any later conversation with you, again brought up

the theory that Mrs. Doherty might have committed suicide?"

"No, sir, he has not."

Hunter dropped it there. Callista was aware of the Sergeant rising,

meeting her glance for an instant with something in his own not at all

unkind. It was not understanding, perhaps not really compassion. He had

never spoken to her. She thought she remembered his face among others at

District Attorney Lamson's office during her worst time of questioning.

He had said nothing then; would have given Mr. Lamson his information at

some other time; maybe he had turned up there (if he really did) just to

have a look at her. What she read in him now might be a simple adult

refusal to condemn, by a busy man, not involved, not personally much

excited or concerned, his thought and daily life filled with a thousand

other matters. And now he was marching away. With nothing of the sarcasm

that would have distorted the words if she had spoken aloud, Callista

thought: _Good-bye--nice to have known you._

The next witness, Sergeant Peterson the photographer, unwound his

scrawniness from some part of the outer blur and strode into the arena

to take the oath. Dark hair, a pallor as if bleached in his own hypo.

Unexpectedly Callista's fingers itched for a pencil, to draw Peterson's

lank face as an expanded kodak. She could ask Cecil for a pencil--no, he

was getting up. Hunter had rather lovingly produced a big Manila folder,

and now came Cecil's sonorous: "May it please the Court--"

Those would be the photographs of Ann Doherty dead, and Cecil would try

to keep out the most lurid ones.

Over Callista swept a weight of memory. Even the smell of the District

Attorney's office--tobacco, book leather, a peculiarly penetrating

shaving-lotion stink. She saw again the half-star shape of a spot on the

wall behind Mr. Lamson's shoulder, an imperfection in the paint like a

chip flaked off the man's pinkish face; and the face itself in all

detail, slightly ascetic in spite of that healthy glow, under carefully

theatrical gray hair. She saw his manicured hand, womanish except for a

scattering of black hairs, reaching across the desk to her, in a reek of

too much hygiene and primping, presenting a Manila folder like the one

Hunter now cherished, possibly the same one. "By the way, Miss Blake--"

tone polite, fruity, luscious with some kind of enjoyment that perhaps

the man himself did not recognize--"you might glance at this folder, if

you will."

_So I held her in my hand._ Ann's arms reached upward in rigor out of

the shadow of earth, for in that first photograph they had let the

drowned girl lie on her back while the camera peered impersonally at wet

skirt tumbled down from flexed thigh (the knee discolored), and soaked

white underpants, the position pointlessly (accidentally?) erotic:

_Death, my lover_. Accidental surely, for the camera had given a sharper

focus to the bedabbled mouth, darkened cheeks, empty eyes. Why must the

small breasts push up so urgently? Why, a happen-so: she was drifting

face down, arms and bent knee probably holding her up a little from the

pond's bottom, when rigor began--_all right, I understand_. The lifted

hands were a blur, foreshortened, ghostly; innocently acquisitive hands

transformed to shadows incapable of holding fast to anything, even pity.

The second picture was an enlargement of the face to life size, no

detail spared. Drops of pond water blurred the eyes; a black twig was

caught in water-soaked hair. Discoloration, and foam.

The third picture was one taken at the morgue, after rigor had passed

off, and though the face was still a comment on the brevity, the

insecurity of beauty and warmth, Ann's no longer vulnerable nakedness

conveyed no great sorrow. It was just a portrait of death; apart from

the drowned face, not unlovely. Callista remembered that in Mr. Lamson's

office she had very nearly remarked aloud: "Never knew she'd had an

appendectomy." The lividity, yes; but one could think of that as simply

the shadow of death. This photograph, Callista supposed, would hardly go

to the jury, for in the morgue nobody had bothered to toss a prudish

towel over the innocent little triangle. Maybe they had fixed up another

one for the purpose, that wouldn't distress the sensibilities of Mr.

Emmet Hoag. Yes, granted, certainly, that Ann had been very pretty and

desirable, a long time ago.

Callista recalled what it was she actually said aloud in Mr. Lamson's

office: "I'd like to be sure I understand. If these pictures shock me,

that's evidence of remorse, in other words guilt. If I don't display any

shock, that means unnatural coldness; in other words, guilt. Is that

correct?"

Someone behind the chair in Lamson's office where she sat facing the

desk light had made a noise. Not T. J. Hunter; Sergeant Rankin maybe;

or could it have been that young Sergeant, Samuel Arthur Shields? An

indistinct word or suppressed grumble; not significant, but Mr. Lamson's

cool gaze had flicked upward at the sound, not liking it. "No, Miss

Blake, I don't think you have it quite correct. A girl of your

intelligence and background ought not to be taking that

world-is-all-against-me attitude. One expects it from common

criminals--we look for it--but surely not from you."

"I've never thought the world was all against me. I used to think it was

a place where you could get by fairly well by telling the truth, minding

your own business, trying not to hurt anyone."

"You don't think so now?"

She herself had heard the wiry unpleasant note of pain in her voice: "No

comment." And Mr. Lamson had heard it, and could not quite hide a brief

flare of gratification, a thin spear of flame shooting up from an ember

behind his eyes. Oh, he was doubtless a decent and respectable man,

father of a family, pillar of the church. It would be only her sickened

imagination that made him something with a whip out of Krafft-Ebing.

"Miss Blake, you ought to understand that what we are trying to do here

is to discover the truth."

"What is truth?"

"No comment."

"Mr. Lamson, since she must have got the poison in my apartment, and

since I shouldn't have had it there, I do feel remorse. But I am not

breaking down and screaming at sight of these pictures, because that is

not my way."

"Oh, now, the pictures aren't all that important, Miss Blake. No

occasion to make such an issue of the pictures. I thought it might be to

your interest to look at them, since a jury will. The whole point, my

dear girl--the whole point is we just don't believe your story."

Cecil Warner came back from the side-bar discussion, looking rather

blind. He murmured: "Couldn't do much, Cal. They're all going in. An

open protest would just antagonize the jury."

"Does it really matter? She'd look the same whether she fell in or was

pushed."

"Dear--I'll be saying that of course. But it assumes that twelve minds

can respect logic."

Hunter and Sergeant Peterson were being immensely fair. Finished now

with the portraits of death, they were showing a photograph of a

blunt-toed shoe superimposed on another mark. Peterson was even wordy

and boring, explaining unnecessarily how you could tell that the

footprint was made later. Then came photographs of the disturbed areas

at other parts of the bank, and of the flat rock by the water's edge

that would take no sign.

The rock. Cecil ought not to be looking so distressed for her. Behind

her hand she whispered: "Peterson must have held his camera right where

I stood. If the moon hadn't come out of a cloud--I wonder, Cecil--would

I have refused to understand she was there? It was a small cloud but

deep, suddenly come, suddenly gone. The rock--I used to sit there for

hours when I was a little girl, and dabble my feet. It was the first

thing I saw, and suddenly, you understand?--because of the moon."

"The moon--"

"Yes, 'the moon, the inconstant moon'--don't you remember I told you?

The way the light strengthened in that gap of the hemlocks, and there

was my rock, and then the whiteness in the water. Her arm, or that

blouse--no, her jacket hid the blouse, she was face down. It must have

been her arm, that whiteness, don't you think?"

"I suppose. Cal, this isn't the time--"

"I know. Hunter will ask: 'Why didn't you go into the pond, if your

story is true? Why, Callista? She might have been alive.'"

"We'll deal with that in direct examination."

"He'll come back to it, though. 'How could you know, Callista? How could

you _know_ she was dead?' And then I say: 'Sir, dead or not, she was so

quiet I couldn't disturb her rest.'"

"Cal, please!"

"Are you going to cross-examine Sergeant Peterson?"

"I don't think so--nothing to gain."

"Ah, I was hoping you'd ask him why his damned silly face looks like a

camera bellows."

"Hush! Shall I come to see you this evening?"

"Oh--no--no, I am unwell. I mean--that is, I would so like to have two

candles, one for you and one for--I'm sorry ... I'm all right now. I'll

be quiet. But don't come tonight--I did mean that. It's something--I

can't explain it."

"All right, my dear. Maybe tomorrow evening."

"Yes, without fail. Let me tell you one thing more?"

"What?"

"I think I'm discovering that I want to live."