be very real that winds it up and keeps it going.”
“I suppose, Mrs. Brown, you have never by any lucky chance arrived at
the reason why He does wind you up and keep you going? Yet surely you
have asked yourself the question why it is necessary that you should be
wound up and kept going.”
“I may have done, sir, now and again. But then it has been a wicked
thought.”
“It is an intensely natural thought, and the wickedness of sheer
undraped nature is one of those hard doctrines I have never been able
to accept. When in the depth of winter you have laid an old skirt
on your bed because you did not happen to possess an extra blanket,
and you have crept with your shivering limbs into the cold sheets, I
suppose you have asked yourself occasionally why you who do not even
perform the humble functions of a clock, since you keep no time, should
yet be wound up and set going, when, as a matter of choice, you would
prefer to remain in bed in the morning and be allowed to sleep on
forever?”
“There are my five little grandchildren, sir, who have no mother or
father.”
“They would go to the workhouse; and the state would transform them
into honorable, capable, and industrious citizens with even greater
efficiency than you would yourself.”
“The workhouse, sir, is a very disgraceful thing for a respectable
family.”
“Ah, you impale me on another spike of your religion. Its points are
fixed at a sharper angle than you are willing to allow. For I would
ask you, is it not enough to enrich the state with five healthy and
able-bodied citizens without being called upon to maintain them at
one’s own expense?”
“I beg your pardon, sir,” said the old woman, “but when you have
children of your own you may not say so.”
“I do not doubt that you are right. By exercising as keenly as possible
the very inadequate number of wits with which nature has seen fit to
arm me, I am able to discern that the more reasonable we become the
less do we order our conduct by the light of reason. As you suggest,
it is extremely probable when I become a father, if I am ever called to
that beatitude, I shall rise every morning from my bed to prevent my
children going to the workhouse, however strenuously reason may urge
that the workhouse is their natural and appointed home. And assuming,
Mrs. Brown, that I am not marked out for the honor of paternity, that
crowning achievement of every citizen, why then should I rise from my
bed--that is, assuming that I regard the person who presumes to wind up
the watch to be a meddlesome busybody, a bore, and a nuisance?”
“If you work very hard, sir, you will have no time to think such
thoughts,” said the old woman.
“It is, I suppose, the satisfaction of depriving yourself of the
opportunities of thinking such thoughts that brings you here every
morning of the year at a quarter to eight to tidy up the garret of a
starving materialist who is bleeding to death of his ideals?”
“Yes, sir, you might say partly that and partly to help to bring up my
grandchildren.”
“Well, my good woman, if it is partly to bring up your grandchildren,
why, may I ask, do you continue to toil on behalf of this person, when
for two months past he has paid you no wage, and may I ask also why
have you lent him sums of money, when you must have been aware that it
was in the highest degree unlikely that it would ever be paid to you
again?”
“I have had no time to think about it like that, sir.”
“That is not a very strong answer, Mrs. Brown. I felt sure I should
be able before long to impale this religion of yours upon a paradox.
And I suppose that when you put this shrivelled old hand that I am
holding into that ridiculous old dogskin purse of yours, which must
have been an heirloom in your family in the year one, you had not time
to reflect that you were robbing your poor little grandchildren? You
had not time to reflect that the twenty-five shillings which you lent a
weak-natured, self-indulgent sentimentalist in order that he might not
be turned out into the street would keep them in boots for a year?”
“I don’t say I had not time to think about it, sir, but I could never
have seen you turned out into the street without a roof above your
head.”
“Why could you not, Mrs. Brown? It was no part of your duties to
provide a home for a stalwart and able-bodied young man who was living
in idleness, when you had your five little, orphan grandchildren to
consider.”
“I did not look at it in that light, sir.”
“Surely it was very wrong of you to fail to do so. One would think a
reasonable, right-minded person would hardly need to have it pointed
out.”
“Well, sir,” said the old woman nervously, “I beg your pardon, I’m
sure; but even if I had seen it in that way I might not have acted upon
it.”
“Then I grieve to say, Mrs. Brown, that you appear to have no very
exact standard of probity.”
“I--I--I’m sure, sir, I always try to do what is right.”
The charwoman had become the prey of a deep confusion.
“But,” said Northcote, sternly, “I have just had your own assurance
that you do not. You would not, it seems, scruple to rob your poor
grandchildren to gratify a whim; indeed, it may be said you have robbed
them to gratify one. If I had to prosecute you before a jury of twelve
of your honest countrymen, I could easily get you put into prison.”
“Well, sir,” said the old charwoman, beginning to tremble violently
before this grim realism, “I--I am sure I have always tried to do my
duty.”
“On the contrary, Mrs. Brown, you can scarcely be said to have a
conception of what is your duty. At least the best that can be said
for that conception is that it is arbitrary, perverse, contradictory.
Expedience is the only duty known to the laws which regulate all
forms of nature. The man called Jesus, the chief exponent of the
contrary doctrine which appears to have had some kind of attraction
for you, received a somewhat severe handling when He ventured to show
Himself upon the platform; and you who in your dumb and vague and
invertebrate manner have been seeking to imitate Him in one or two
minor particulars, owe it to the generous forbearance of the recipient
of your charity that you do not find yourself in prison. If the Crown
in its expansive vindictiveness were to instruct me to prosecute you in
what it is pleased to call a ‘court of justice,’ woe would betide you.”
The old woman grew as pale as ashes when confronted with the stern eyes
of this advocate who turned white into black so easily.
“Why--why, sir,” she stammered, “you--you will make me think I have
committed a murder if you go on!”
“I think I might do that without much difficulty. It would be quite
simple to indicate to you in a very few words in what manner the
Almighty has already seen fit to mark the sense of His personal
displeasure. Is it not your own conduct, do you not suppose, which
has provoked Him to strike down your innocent little grandchild with
diphtheria? And if the child dies, which we will pray it will not,
what would be easier than to render you responsible for its death? You
see that is the worst of evil, it is so cumulative in its effect. Once
it has begun its dread courses, who shall predict their end? A good
action is self-contained and stops where it began; a bad one fructifies
with immortal seed and practically goes on for ever--_vide_ the poet
Shakespeare. Why, you are eating nothing. I am afraid I am spoiling
your breakfast.”
“Oh, sir, I didn’t know I was so wicked,” said the charwoman, with
tears in her eyes.
“Opinions are easily formed. As for reputations, they can be made and
unmade and made again in an hour. But might I suggest, Mrs. Brown, that
if one happens to be righteous in one’s own eyes, it does not very
greatly matter if one goes to jail to expiate so pious an opinion. Do I
make myself clear?”
“I--I don’t say I am good, sir, but--I hope I am not a downright bad
one.”
“Well, to relieve your feelings, we will take it that you are a
nebulous half-and-half and somewhat unsatisfactory sort of person who
blindly follows a bundle of instincts she knows less than nothing
about, just like a dog or a cat or a rabbit. And is not that what this
elaborate moral code of ours throws back to if we take the trouble
to examine it? And is not one entitled to say that a dog is a good
dog, a cat a good cat, a rabbit a good rabbit, just as faithfully as
it follows the instincts under its fur, whatever they happen to be? I
have taken this excursus, Mrs. Brown, and have ventured to theorize a
little, quite unprofitably, I grant, and at the risk of causing you
some ill-founded alarm, because to-morrow I have to exercise all the
talents with which the good God has endowed me in the cause of an
extremely wicked woman who has committed a murder. Her crime is of a
vulgar and calculating kind, perpetrated in cold blood; there is not
a rag of evidence to save her from the gallows; but Providence has
called upon me to attempt to save her from the fate she so richly
merits. And there is an instinct within me, her advocate, for which I
am at a loss to account by the rules of reason and logic, which calls
on its possessor to save this abandoned creature at all hazard. If I
obey that instinct I shall be a good advocate and a bad citizen; if I
disobey it I shall be a good citizen but a bad advocate. Yet if I obey
it I shall have fulfilled to the best of my ability the legal contract
into which I have entered, and in so doing I shall be called on to
commit a serious misdemeanor against human nature. On the other hand,
if I disobey it I shall be causing human nature to be vindicated in a
becoming manner, yet shall be guilty of an equally serious misdemeanor
against myself; and further, I shall be false to the interests of
my unfortunate client whose money I have taken, and render myself
indictable for the offence of entering into a contract which I have
wilfully refrained from carrying out. Please have another cup of tea,
and kindly pass the marmalade.”
Northcote having shifted the ground of his reasoning from the personal
to the abstract, the old woman regained sufficient confidence to pour
out the tea without spilling it.
“Now,” said Northcote, “if you were in my position, would you try to
enable one whom you knew to be a murderess to escape the gallows?”
“If I might say so, sir, I would try to have nothing to do with her at
all.”
“In other words, you would rather starve than take her money?”
“Yes, sir, I think I would.”
“And cause _you_ to rob your poor little grandchildren?”
“I--I--don’t say that, sir.”
“Let us be as logical as we can. Again, would it not cause me to rob my
poor old mother who has contributed her all towards my education, which
I put to no useful end?”
“You would be honest, sir.”
“Honest, do you say! Do you call it honest to pervert and misapply the
money my mother has lavished on my education?”
“Might you not use your education, sir, in some other way?”
“You would have me till the fields or be a clerk in an insurance
office. Would that be honest in the sight of God, who has placed
an instinct in me which I disobey? Surely one would say the truly
dishonest man is he who is unfaithful to his nature. Had we not
agreed upon that? If a man knows that he was designed by God to be an
advocate, is he not called to practise? Why have the gift to prove
that white is black and black is white if that gift is not to be
carried to its appointed issue? If I do not barter it for a means of
livelihood by proving the guilty to be innocent, how am I to discharge
the higher function of proving the innocent to be not guilty? If, in my
cowardice, I decline to go into court lest I save those who ought not
to be saved, think of the innocent persons who will perish for the lack
of a true advocate.”
“If we could only get to the real intention, sir,” said the charwoman
solemnly, “of Him who winds up the watch and who is Himself the key,
perhaps these things might not worry us. But God moves in a mysterious
way, His wonders to perform.”
“Yes,” said Northcote, rising from the breakfast-table, “there we have
the fruit of all that our curiosity can yield to us. The power may be
given to us to show that blue is green, but what does it stand for in
the presence of the dread materialism of our religions?”
The advocate took three sovereigns from his pocket, three sovereigns
which he had yet to earn, and placed them in the palm of the old
charwoman.
“Mrs. Brown,” he said, “in the bleak and uncomfortable eyes of science
your virtue will not bear inquiry; but if it were possible to take a
plebiscite of the opinions of your fellows as hastily as possible upon
the bare facts, before a professional advocate had a chance to pervert
them, I do not doubt that you would be voted to a position among the
elect. I believe myself that there is a greater amount of purely
disinterested nobility among all sections of society than is generally
known. Fifteen shillings I owe you for services rendered; twenty-five
for your timely contribution towards my rent; and here is a pound with
which to pay the kind doctor who is going to thwart the Almighty in His
intention of causing your small grandchild to die. One of these days,
as I say, Mrs. Brown, I hope you may meet my mother, for I would like
to render to you the homage that all men desire to be allowed to render
to good women.”
He seized the blackened, shrivelled, and not particularly clean hand
and carried it to his lips.
XVII
MESSRS. WHITCOMB AND WHITCOMB
After the old woman had cleared the table of the breakfast things and
she had gone away, Northcote sat nearly two hours in his easy chair at
the fire, whose grate had never been allowed to consume so much fuel
since it had been in his occupation, and with the aid of his brief
proceeded to rehearse all the points of the case as they presented
themselves to him. Warmth, food, and rest had overthrown his weariness,
and his mind which in its operations was habitually so energetic began
to shape and docket every conceivable aspect of the matter that could
be of the slightest service to the accused. His reasoning was so
amazingly copious that he foresaw and proceeded immediately to guard
against a very real danger.
He might easily overdo it. The jury would not be men of education
to whom fine points would appeal. Most probably they would be petty
tradesmen whom it would be impossible to touch through the mind at all.
He must take aim at their emotions. “I must use,” he said to himself
in his mental analysis, “not a word beyond three syllables, and I must
keep to the language of the Bible as well as I can. All my little
pieces of embroidery, all my little bravura passages must bear that
singularly excellent model in mind; its power of touching the commonest
clay is so unfailing. Happily, in the course of my somewhat eclectic
studies it has not been neglected. But beyond all I must try to get my
address quite fine and close. One word too much and the whole thing
fizzles out in a haze of perplexity. For that reason I am afraid I
must reject some of my choicest and neatest thrusts at the moral code,
which ought to tickle to death all minds with a gleam of humor. No,
I must deny myself those bright excursions in which the cloven hoof
of the artist betrays itself, and put my faith in a few common tricks
performed with mastery. They at least should set up the honest English
grocer on his hind legs and make him purr like anything.”
Before the ingenuity of this keen intelligence those obstacles which
were bristling everywhere in the case, which to the average mind would
have appeared insurmountable, began rapidly to melt away. It was with
an ill-concealed joy that he shed the lime-light of paradox on each
point that presented itself. That array of facts which a judge and jury
of his countrymen would hug to their bosoms as so many pearls they
could positively hold in their hands he would disperse with a touch of
his wand. In the ripeness of his talent he foresaw that it would cost
him no labor to demolish the evidence, to turn it inside out.
The world is full of great masterpieces that have been created out of
nothing, haunting and beautiful things which have been spun by genius
out of the air. And are not feats like these more wonderful than the
exercise of the natural alchemy of change by which fairness is turned
into ugliness, poetry into lunacy, good into evil, truth into error?
The constructive faculty is rare and consummate; when it appears
it leaves a track of light in the heavens; but the faculty of the
demolisher is at work every day. Northcote was conscious that he was a
born demolisher of “evidence,” of those trite dogmas, those brutalized
formulas of the average sensual mind. When he looked for truth he
sought it at the bottom of the well. On the morrow for the first time
he would give free play to his dangerous faculty.
When he had blocked out and brought into harmony the main lines of his
address to the jury, it occurred to him that his powers might receive
an additional stimulus if he saw the accused, exchanged a few words
with her, brought himself into intimate relation with her outlook. Up
to this point she had been no more than an academic figure, around whom
he had woven detached, somewhat Socratic arguments. He felt that to
see and to know her would be to place yet another weapon in his hands,
wherewith he would be enabled to dig another pit for those whom he had
already come to look on as his, no less than her, deadly adversaries.
Already he was a little amused by his own complacency, the conviction
of his own success. There was that curious quality within him that
forbade his evoking the possibility of failure in so great an
enterprise. He was so grotesquely sure of his own power to triumph over
arbitrary material facts. Such a sense of personal infallibility could
only spring from the profoundest ignorance, or from talent in its most
virile and concentrated form. For what was more likely than that on
inspection the accused would present one of the most abandoned figures
of her calling? Was it not highly probable that nature, who takes such
infinite precaution to safeguard her creatures, had caused this woman
to assume the shape of a hag, a harpy, a thing of loathsome, terrible
abasement? In that case, how would he dispose of evidence in its most
salient form? How would he dispose of that immutable instinct, that
deep conviction which is conferred by personality?
On the other hand, if the accused, by the aid of one of those miracles
of which the world is so full, were to present the outlines of actual
personal beauty, through whose agency common sensual minds are appealed
to so easily, how slight would his difficulties be! In that event,
so far as her advocate was concerned, the gilt would be off the
gingerbread, his achievement would cease to be astonishing. Indeed,
so finely tempered was his arrogance that to undertake the defence of
one of this kind would be distasteful to it, so small would be the
field afforded for personal glory. Rather than have to deal with one
who could be trusted to be her own most efficient advocate, he would
prefer that a veritable harpy out of a sewer should be placed in the
dock. Could he have been allowed the privilege of choosing a theme for
his powers, he believed that he should best consult the dictates of his
talent by asking for a commonplace, unillumined woman of forty to be
put up.
Deciding at last to seek an interview with the accused, he set forth
to the offices of his client in Chancery Lane. On his way thither he
occupied himself with drawing the portrait of the ideal subject as his
mind conceived her. She would be forty, with her hair turning gray.
She would be a plain, drab, slightly elusive figure, cowed a little by
life, the privations she had undergone, and the ignominy and terror of
her situation. The positive, the actual would be to seek in her; she
would offer no target for too facile sympathies. Her inaccessibility
to all suggestions of romance or of picturesqueness would lend to
her predicament that extreme peril which it would be her advocate’s
chief glory to surmount. All the same, he desired no ghoul, but a
human being. She might be visibly stained, buffeted, common, broken,
devoid of a meaning to eyes that were unacquainted with the poetry of
misfortune, the irony of blunt truths; yet let a few rags of her sex
remain, let her be capable of humiliation, of being rendered in piteous
fear.
At the offices of Messrs. Whitcomb and Whitcomb in Chancery Lane he was
informed that the senior partner was anxiously awaiting him.
“Ah, here you are at last!” exclaimed the solicitor, rising to receive
him. “I thought you would have been round before.”
“I suppose you only honor a silk gown with a consultation in his own
chambers?” said Northcote.
“Chambers, you call them! Well, did we not hold it last night?”
“One cannot very well hold a consultation with one’s client before one
receives one’s brief.”
“What dignity!”
“Is it not at least half the stock in trade of mediocrity?”
“What modesty! Do I take it that the rather formidable ’Ercles vein of
last night is really no more?”
“You may not. It is waxing higher and higher.”
“Defend us, gentle heaven and pious gods!”
“A truce to these pleasantries. Put on your hat and take me to the jail
to see the accused.”
“You are going a little fast, my young friend, are you not? Is it
wholly necessary that you should see the accused? Is it wholly to her
interest or to yours?”
“Wholly, I assure you.”
“Well, before we get as far as that, I am particularly curious to know
what line you have decided to take. Is it too much to ask that you
have decided not to adhere to the acquittal? Speaking for myself, I
must confess that the more consideration I give to the question, the
less do I like that idea. Tobin would certainly have taken the line of
insanity.”
“Last night you were good enough to inform me of that.”
“Well, my young friend, what is good enough for Tobin should be good
enough for you.”
“That also you were good enough to inform me of last evening. But,
my dear fellow, pray do not let us go over this ground again.
Unfortunately Tobin and myself do not inhabit quite the same
intellectual plane.”
“Unfortunately that appears to be the case,” said the solicitor.
“Tobin’s is the lower,” said the young man blandly.
“Tobin will be glad to know that.”
“I hope he may. After to-morrow he will be the first to admit it. But
once more I crave to be allowed to conduct this case in my own way.
I can listen to none; so be a good fellow, put on your hat, and come
along to see the lady.”
“Well, I must say that for a youngster who is asked for the first time
to conduct the defence in a capital charge you don’t lack confidence in
yourself.”
“If I did I should not be holding the brief.”
“There is something in that. And in any case you will have to have your
way now. It is too late in the day to stand up against you.”
Mr. Whitcomb pressed his bell and a clerk appeared.
“I want permission to interview Emma Harrison. Will you ring up the
prison and see if you can get the governor to give it?”
The clerk withdrew.
“They are not likely to refuse it?” said Northcote.
“They ought not to be,” said Mr. Whitcomb, “but when you are confronted
with Mr. Bumble in any shape or form, your motto must always be, ‘You
never can tell.’”
“Arbitrary brute,” said the young man with vehemence, “I hate him
altogether.”
“I also; but one should always do him the justice of conceding that he
has arduous duties to perform.”
“Presumably that is the reason why he aggravates difficulties of those
who are called to help him in performing them.”
“Is not that what we agree to call ‘human nature’? But really I think
it is the duty of every citizen to think of him tenderly. He means
well. He is not a bad fellow at bottom.”
“I have no patience,” said the young man truculently. “Mean well!--not
a bad fellow at bottom! Why, he and his satellites are the custodians
of the life and liberties of the whole population. One wonders how many
innocent lives have been sworn away by this fat-witted blunderer who is
barely able to write his own name.”
“You are too strong, my son. His responsibilities are immense; the
wonder is that he plays up to them in the manner that he does.”
“You are all members of the same great and far-reaching society; you
have all sworn allegiance to one another. Mediocrity arm in arm with
Mediocrity; Law and Order arm in arm with Law and Order.”
“Insolent dog!”