The courtroom had gone into a silence where voices were remembered with
uncertainty, like the dead. The judge's chair was empty. Three reporters
talked in small murmurs at the press table, waiting it out, and a few
spectators remained. Edith watched Mr. Delehanty appear from the small
side door at her left, take up with quiet importance a manila folder
from his idle desk, mutter inaudibly to one of the bailiffs, glance
first at an old-fashioned gold watch from his pocket and then toward the
door on the right through which the jury had disappeared three hours
ago; then he tiptoed in dignity away. It was nine o'clock in the evening
of Friday, December 11th. Closing speeches, the judge's summing up and
charge to the jury--done, and anticlimactic all of them, for it seemed
to Edith that it was Callista herself who had closed the trial,
yesterday. "_I'll answer no more questions_--" standing up then, even
before she was dismissed, but waiting with the politeness of a tired
guest until Hunter murmured something that Edith did not hear; and she
stepped down, took hold of Cecil Warner's hand, and walked with him
drowsily to the defense table, and sat leaning her head back against his
arm, eyes closed, until the Judge announced adjournment for the day. No
part of the courtroom ritual now remained--except one. The long finger
of the electric wall clock jerked, and was still a while.
After today's ordeal of listening--anticlimactic, yes, the Judge's voice
roughened at the end of his summing-up, at moments not plainly audible,
running down like a mechanism with a used-up spring--after the jury had
retired, Edith had seen Victoria Chalmers press her hand to her broad
pale forehead, rise, accept with sad patience the Associate Professor's
fumbling courtesy with her coat, and move away. She would be having one
of her headaches. No nod for Edith--Herb Chalmers gave her one--and no
backward look at the arena; but as Victoria turned her head the light
washed coldly across her face, and Edith saw plainly that even Victoria
was a little changed. A sag of the mouth, a droop of shoulders and
sturdy frame, a slowness and uncertainty in the hands adjusting her coat
that suggested old age, although she was still in the early forties. She
seemed doubtful of her steps, an unsteady hand undecided whether to
grasp her handbag or tuck it under her arm. At the exit she did look
backward once, with vagueness, as though there might be something she
wished to say; or even someone she wished to find. Then like an old lady
she rested her arm on Herb's clumsy hand, and was gone.
Edith found it was now natural, inevitable, to pity Victoria
Chalmers--whatever pity might be worth. Earlier, until the jury went out
through that doorway, there had somehow not been time. There was time
now for every sort of thought, regret and fear and wonder, time for a
swarm of thoughts crowding for attention, pity the least of them--time
for anything the mind could do except for the discoveries of happiness
and peace. Pity, maybe, was no more than a private vice, with varied
by-products, some good, some bad.
Herb Chalmers had come back an hour later, alone. He made as though to
sit down by himself, but seeing her look his way, he shambled to her,
side-stepping along a row of vacant seats, and let himself down by her
in a long-legged sprawl. "I suppose nothing's happened yet?"
"Nothing. Is Mrs. Chalmers all right?"
"I don't know," he said, his weariness lending the force of truth to the
absent reply. He yawned convulsively, apologizing for it in a mumble.
"She's pretty used up of course. Felt she couldn't stay, and I thought
that was sensible. I took her home, and maybe she can sleep. It's not as
if we could do anything now. For a while. You see, I feel sure that
they--" he rubbed large hands over his face and shook his head--"no, God
knows I don't feel sure of anything any more. Anything at all."
Herb also had aged. More deeply sunken lines, more gray in the thinning
hair. He had evidently cut himself shaving that morning; the scab at the
edge of his gaunt jawbone was overlaid by the day's growth of silvery
bristle, making a sort of Skid Row shadow across his wan, weak,
intelligent face.
"They can't find first degree," Edith said. "It's not possible." Yet she
might be only trying to convince herself; she heard no strength in her
own voice. "The Judge's summing-up--oh, he had to define all the
possible verdicts, but the way he did it, the stress he laid on
reasonable doubt--and then even the very fact that she said what she
did, at the end--they can't do that."
He mumbled what might have been agreement, then turned to her suddenly,
large-eyed, wounded, ineffectual. "They could though, Miss Nolan.
Juries ... we have to face the fact, anything's possible from acquittal
to--first degree. Law tries to go by logic, but never quite succeeds."
More than one way, she thought inconsequently, of facing facts: walk up
to a fact and spit in its eye, Callista's way; or, like Herb Chalmers,
just stand there. And you could make out a pretty good case for Herb's
way, sometimes. _My way--my way..._ "Why didn't he call me, Miss Nolan?"
"Well, he--I think he felt that character witnesses--and that's all I
amounted to--couldn't help much. Any more of that would have pointed up
the lack of any other kind of evidence. I suppose juries discount the
word of friends and relatives; it's natural."
He wasn't listening much. "I would have done anything. I failed her
somehow, somewhere along the line. From the start, I guess." He sighed
and fidgeted. "But maybe she'd have resented anyone situated in her
father's place. I remember when I first met her, a kid of eleven, I
said: 'Look, Callie, I'm not your father and couldn't try to be anything
like him. I'm just me, a person, and I'd like us to be friends.'
Eleven--it never got across, you know? Infantile glowering, and then a
kind of frozen politeness that I never could break through." He sat
quiet, perhaps aware of her as a listener, gazing aimlessly at the broad
knuckles of his bony hands. He said with curious humility and no
resentment: "She's always had a good deal of contempt for me, I think.
Children grow up so fast, and we grow old so fast. You know, Miss Nolan,
a while ago I started something, a piece of writing--nothing very much,
but it might prove interesting. A study of the Cavalier and Courtier
Lyrists. I want to relate them to certain trends in modern poetry. You
know, it's never been done. Oh, I suppose it'll turn out to be just
another trifle of academic stuff. But the curious thing--look, I'm
afraid I'm boring you or getting on your nerves at a bad time--"
"No, you're not, not in the least." Her impulse toward callous and
hopeless laughter ceased of itself, no need to fight it down. Abruptly,
there was nothing funny at all about stringy Herb Chalmers having an
affair with the saucy music and tenderness of the Lyrists. He was a
scholar; he knew his subject; he might even have something to say.
"Well, the curious thing--" he blushed briefly like a schoolboy, and
blew his nose, and sighed--"curious thing, when I was getting together
some of my notes for it the other day, I kept thinking--imagining
Callista reading it. Escape psychology, I suppose."
"Why call it that? 'Escape' is just another one of those
two-for-a-nickel derogatory noises that people use in place of thinking.
Why not escape from ugliness toward something better? Escaping doesn't
mean you've forgotten the ugliness is there."
"Something in that. Is Warner with her, do you know?"
"I think so. He wouldn't leave her unless she asked to be alone."
"He surprised me this morning, that closing speech. Two and a half
hours. I never thought he'd take all morning, and repeat himself so
much. It was--effective, maybe, but it scared me too. I couldn't help
thinking it was effective only for people who already _know_ Callista. I
tried to think myself into the position of a juryman, a mind totally
alien to Callista's. Everything he said was good, but he said too much.
Trying to ram it through a stone wall.... I suppose you saw how once or
twice he lost the thread of what he was saying and just stood there.
Looking lost."
"Yes. He's not just a defense lawyer in this thing. He loves her."
"I've felt that, yes. And so did the jury, I'm afraid--more than he
should have let them feel it. It even gave Hunter his cue, I think.
After all that thunder and pleading, he could afford to be quiet and
cold, and make the mere contrast seem like a virtue. Taking it off now
and then to abstract principles the way Warner did--that was good, for
us. I can't believe more than two or three of the jury went along with
it. 'The defense never rests'--yes, but what can that plumber foreman
make out of it? Ah, I don't know...." The intelligent professor faded,
leaving a collapsed and tired old man. He shrugged, looked at his watch,
gathered his legs under him. "I'm going out for a smoke. Want to?"
"No, I'd better stay, Dr. Chalmers. She'll be coming back when the jury
returns, if it does return tonight. She's always looked for me when she
first comes in. I've got to be here."
"Yes, I--of course." He blundered away a few steps and turned back to
her. "Miss Nolan, I thought you were quite wonderful on the stand--said
a number of things I would have liked to say."
Edith winced inwardly, wishing he would go. "In the jury's view I wasn't
good. Another maverick."
"Oh, I don't know." He rubbed his sagging face. "Shouldn't underestimate
their intelligence, I suppose. It's--democracy in action, you might
say--something like that."
"Democracy be God-damned," Edith said. "It's a human life."
"Well, I--see what you mean of course." He stood tall and drooping near
her, so that she must bend her neck awkwardly to see his face as he went
on, driven by some compulsion to talk when perhaps he had no real wish
to do so: "Strange thing--had a dream a while ago, possibly an echo of
my reading--Huck Finn likely. Lost in a fog, on a raft, watching the
river stream past me--sometimes the water'd slop up between chinks in
the logs. All under a milky fog, no landmarks, but I could see the river
all the time, the dark flow of it, now and then trash and broken things
sliding past. It went on, you know, years, a hundred years, who could
say? And I thought I was motionless, nothing more than a pair of eyes,
brain somewhere back of them. Well, but--here was the nightmare, you
see--I suddenly understood that I was drifting too, had been all the
time. Doesn't sound like anything in the telling, but it was horrible--I
can't tell you. Drifting all the time when I thought only the river was
in motion. The sleeping brain's comment on myself, you see?--myself as
summing up all human stupidity. Or blindness--much kinder word, isn't
it? 'So may you, when the music's done, awake and see the rising
sun'--that's from Thomas Carew, I think, died 1639 or around there. My
head is an attic, you know, full of little facts with dust on them. They
were so concerned, those poets, with treating love itself as a work of
art, you'd think to read them superficially they had nothing else on
their minds. But there was a depth, Miss Nolan, something you don't
discover right away. All that polish, glitter, gracefulness, word-play,
that was something they produced _after_ accepting the squalor and
danger and confusion of seventeenth-century living. They knew what they
were doing. Reading the avant-garde stuff of nowadays, usually the
contrast is merely grotesque, still I keep finding parallels. Here and
there. It keeps an old man interested. Well, I'm babbling like second
childhood. Telling dreams, at my age! Look, can I get you anything? I
think I'll take a walk around the block, can't sit still. Coke?
Sandwich?"
"I guess not, thanks all the same. Jumpy stomach."
"Mm, I know." Her neck ached. _Please go!_ He was leaning down, a
remote, remotely friendly ghost, a friend of Thomas Carew, also a
human being in distress. "A thing like this--you know, Miss Nolan,
I believe the very worst of it is that we _forget_. Because we
have to, maybe. We're beaten down somehow, used up, licked in the
end by the daily littleness--head colds, weakening eyesight, the
brush-your-teeth-and-put-out-the-milk-bottles sort of thing, and there's
no defense." At any other time, Edith thought, she would have enjoyed
listening to this particular Herb Chalmers. "My God, littleness steals
everything, including the last breath. And before then, you see, no
matter what we resolve, what we hope for--we forget."
"I sha'n't forget."
"I'm fifty, Miss Nolan. You're still very young. Thirty years from now,
d'you think you'll know just as clearly what's been happening here, what
will happen when those people come back through that door? Ah, I don't
know, I'm talking like a fool--who's going to see thirty years ahead?
Jim Doherty's already forgetting. In a bar."
"What? Did you see him?"
"Last night he was anyway, and it looked as if he was laying the
foundation for a long one. After I took Vic home last night I came back
to town, to the college--had to make some kind of pass at the week's
work that's piled up on me--they've been very nice, leave of absence and
so on, but I notice things pile up anyway, letters, term papers, what
not. On the way home I stopped at Judson's--that's uptown, bar where I
used to go sometimes with Jim and--Ann, before all this. He was there,
tight as a tick, must have been working on it all afternoon. Not here
today, I notice. Last night I tried to get him to go home with me, but
he'd made friends with some character who looked respectable, capable of
putting him to bed right side up."