"Know what you mean. Democracy in action." _I can't smile, Herb._
"Well--go for a walk, I guess. Can't sit still. 'Bye." He stumbled off,
a weary progress with a slow grab at every chair-back along the awkward
route...
Cecil Warner came through the doorway at the left, alone, his broad face
sallow, all ruddiness washed away. He passed the press table with a
shake of the head and no other answer to some tactless and poorly timed
question. He came up the aisle, and sank with slow motion into the seat
beside Edith, relaxing his bulk all at once with the suddenness of an
old man's muscles letting go. "Tell me," she said.
"A message. She wanted me to come to you with a message. 'Tell my friend
Edith I'll sleep well tonight, and ask her whether she'd like me to try
Doris Wayne in oil or watercolor.'" He would not quite look at her. "She
was smiling, Edith. It seemed to be a little flash of happiness, like a
breeze on a still day."
"It's good if she can think ahead. I've been trying to, but I can't.
Herb Chalmers was here, wandered off--good Lord, half an hour ago! I've
just been sitting like a vegetable." She saw his eyes were held by the
clock, against his will. "Cecil, does it necessarily mean anything at
all, when they stay out this long?"
He looked at her then, studying her face as if from a distance, deeply
aware of her and certainly no less aware of the girl in the detention
cell. He said: "It's not good."
"It's what would happen if there was a disagreement, isn't it?"
"Yes. A disagreement would not be good. A new trial very likely wouldn't
come before Terence Mann. And I wouldn't be competent, physically
competent, to go through it again. I'm getting pains down the left arm,
other things--" he waved his hand quickly and irritably to dismiss the
concern in her face. "Couldn't risk conking out in the middle of a
trial. That would make a mistrial, then another wait, a third trial with
some other attorney, quite likely some other judge--Hangman Cleever for
instance. No good, no good. Oh, I shouldn't have taken it on this time.
Or I should have got someone younger to work in court with me. That's
only one mistake I made. I've made hundreds. Vanity, vanity, thinking
myself better able to defend her than anyone else, and blundering all
the time--"
"No."
"Don't waste your breath comforting me now. I can see it, Edith, I can
see it. My last mistake was talking too long this morning. I couldn't
let go, even when I knew I wasn't getting through to them. Some kind of
idiot compulsion to hold off the moment when T.J. would start--as if
that could make any difference. A cub fresh out of law school wouldn't
make such an error--I've been at it forty years."
"Cecil, stop whipping yourself. You did everything possible."
"Everything I could, yes. But everything I could do wasn't enough, and a
lot of it was done wrong. A stronger man could have done more, done it
better. Why, there's the big evil of the adversary system, Edith, right
under our noses. Should the life or freedom of a human being depend on
the perfectly irrelevant strength or weakness of opposing counsel? What
in hell do my skill and brains, or T.J.'s, have to do with Callista's
innocence or any of the other facts? What could be more medieval? But we
accept it, have accepted it for hundreds of years, meekly, stupidly, as
if no other method were possible or worth a thought. I've spent my life
inside the propositions of a vicious fallacy, and discovered it at
sixty-eight."
"One man couldn't do away with the fallacy. It's too heavily
established, and maybe there isn't enough wisdom in the world yet to
develop a better way. You had to work inside of what you found, and it's
not wasted effort. Within the system, you've saved a good many lives
from public vengeance--and never mind whether they've been good lives
like Callista's, or the lives of crooks and psychopaths, that's not the
point. Each time you've set your face against public vengeance, you've
brought some minds that much nearer to learning that the whole notion of
vengeance and punishment is wrong. You've done your share. You've been
on the side of mercy. How many can say that?"
"Well, my dear, you're good for me. Maybe I should have been a doctor. I
remember thinking of it for a while, when I was in college--but I felt
that the wish wasn't enough, that I didn't have the other qualities it
needs."
"I think a defense lawyer--your kind of defense lawyer, Cecil--is in
something like a doctor's position, but without any adequate sciences to
support him. A doctor can draw on chemistry, physiology, pharmacology, a
dozen other disciplines, and rely pretty solidly on what he gets from
them. A lawyer trying to be useful according to rational ethics--what is
there to help him? An infant science of human behavior, full of errors
and contradictions and blank spots, hardly more advanced than physiology
was in the eighteenth century; and haunted by the crackpots and
manipulators too, so that it's sometimes hell's own job to separate the
science from the special pleading. So I think, Cecil, that anyone who
defends a life against the crowd's desire for a victim, who shows up the
flaws in the system by bucking it--he's pioneering, he's taking a part
in bringing law nearer to reality. I'll set Clarence Darrow in the same
company with Semmelweiss and Pasteur, any time, no strain. And you."
He covered his face quickly with his hands; said after a while: "I wish
I were a younger man, to hear that."
Edith looked away at the clock. Her mind was caught in a brief paralysis
of waiting for the next twitch of the minute hand. "I drew something the
other night, Cecil, a memory sketch of that jury. It's curiously good."
She heard his breathing slow and become quiet. "My own style, but the
kind of thing I was never able to do before. I want you to see it. Come
over soon anyway--I need my friends too, you know. We try, Cecil,
oddballs like you and Callista and me, others here and there. Herb
Chalmers told me he's having a thing with the Cavalier and Courtier
Lyrists. I started laughing inside--just started because it seemed so
damn far away from everything--and then stopped laughing. It's Herb's
way of trying, using his brains in his own style on what's nearest to
his reach."
"Callista and I put the human race on trial the other night. We came to
no conclusion, no verdict."
"Well, I think there's an obvious verdict in that case, and maybe only
one possible at the present stage."
"So? You tell me."
"Not proven."
"I should have thought of that. Cal would like it. I'll remember to tell
her." Beyond the melancholy and desolation of his face she saw Herb
Chalmers returning along the row of empty seats. Warner nodded to him
morosely. "Herb. All by yourself?"
"I took Vic home." Herb Chalmers showed the dubious tension of a
news-bringer. "Cecil, what way does the jury-room face?"
"What way?" The Old Man's eyebrows bunched aggressively in perplexity.
"The Court Street side. Why, Herb?"
"They're yawping a _Courier_ extra on the street. Judd died in the
hospital a couple of hours ago." He pulled a smeary paper from his
overcoat and handed it to Warner, who stared at the splash of black ink
and let the thing slither to the floor. "A brass-lunged newsboy, Cecil:
'Blake Case Witness Dies ree aw abowit!'"
"Some fool," Warner said--"some fool in the jury-room is bound to open a
window, to let the smoke out."
"He was shouting pretty plain. I could make out the words a block away.
Any legal significance, you think?"
"I doubt it, Herb." Warner looked up hopelessly. "Anyway she gains
nothing from a mistrial. Likely it wouldn't even go before the same
judge, a second time. Everything that could happen," he said. "Malice,
chance, blind circumstance, human frailty. Even the malice nobody's
fault really--not even T.J.'s. He's something worked by strings."
"They can't find first degree," Edith said, and hated the querulous
shake in her voice, its jaded insistence on what she could not know.
"Twenty to life," said Warner.
"She's young," Edith said. "She's very young."