"OUTER DARKNESS"
If any echo of doubt concerning his undesirable conspicuousness sounded
faintly in Joe's mind, it was silenced eftsoons. Canaan had not
forgotten him--far from it!--so far that it began pointing him out to
strangers on the street the very day of his return. His course of
action, likewise that of his friends, permitted him little obscurity,
and when the rumors of his finally obtaining lodging at Beaver Beach,
and of the celebration of his installation there, were presently
confirmed, he stood in the lime-light indeed, as a Mephistopheles
upsprung through the trap-door.
The welcoming festivities had not been so discreetly conducted as to
accord with the general policy of Beaver Beach. An unfortunate
incident caused the arrest of one of the celebrators and the
ambulancing to the hospital of another on the homeward way, the ensuing
proceedings in court bringing to the whole affair a publicity devoutly
unsought for. Mr. Happy Fear (such was the habitual name of the
imprisoned gentleman) had to bear a great amount of harsh criticism for
injuring a companion within the city limits after daylight, and for
failing to observe that three policemen were not too distant from the
scene of operations to engage therein.
"Happy, if ye had it in mind to harm him," said the red-bearded man to
Mr. Fear, upon the latter's return to society, "why didn't ye do it out
here at the Beach?"
"Because," returned the indiscreet, "he didn't say what he was goin' to
say till we got in town."
Extraordinary probing on the part of the prosecutor had developed at
the trial that the obnoxious speech had referred to the guest of the
evening. The assaulted party, one "Nashville" Cory, was not of Canaan,
but a bit of drift-wood haply touching shore for the moment at Beaver
Beach; and--strange is this world--he had been introduced to the
coterie of Mike's Place by Happy Fear himself, who had enjoyed a brief
acquaintance with him on a day when both had chanced to travel
incognito by the same freight. Naturally, Happy had felt responsible
for the proper behavior of his protege--was, in fact, bound to enforce
it; additionally, Happy had once been saved from a term of imprisonment
(at a time when it would have been more than ordinarily inconvenient)
by help and advice from Joe, and he was not one to forget. Therefore he
was grieved to observe that his own guest seemed to be somewhat jealous
of the hero of the occasion and disposed to look coldly upon him. The
stranger, however, contented himself with innuendo (mere expressions of
the face and other manner of things for which one could not squarely
lay hands upon him) until such time as he and his sponsor had come to
Main Street in the clear dawn on their way to Happy's apartment--a
variable abode. It may be that the stranger perceived what Happy did
not; the three bluecoats in the perspective; at all events, he now put
into words of simple strength the unfavorable conception he had formed
of Joe. The result was mediaevally immediate, and the period of Mr.
Cory's convalescence in the hospital was almost half that of his
sponsor's detention in the county jail.
It needed nothing to finish Joe with the good people of Canaan; had it
needed anything, the trial of Happy Fear would have overspilled the
necessity. An item of the testimony was that Joseph Louden had helped
to carry one of the ladies present--a Miss Le Roy, who had fainted--to
the open air, and had jostled the stranger in passing. After this, the
oldest woman in Canaan would not have dared to speak to Joe on the
street (even if she wanted to), unless she happened to be very poor or
very wicked. The Tocsin printed an adequate account (for there was "a
large public interest"), recording in conclusion that Mr. Louden paid
the culprit's fine which was the largest in the power of the presiding
judge in his mercy to bestow. Editorially, the Tocsin leaned to the
facetious: "Mr. Louden has but recently 'returned to our midst.' We
fervently hope that the distinguished Happy Fear will appreciate his
patron's superb generosity. We say 'his patron,' but perhaps we err in
this. Were it not better to figure Mr. Louden as the lady in distress,
Mr. Fear as the champion in the lists? In the present case, however,
contrary to the rules of romance, the champion falls in duress and
passes to the dungeon. We merely suggest, en passant, that some of our
best citizens might deem it a wonderful and beauteous thing if, in
addition to paying the fine, Mr. Louden could serve for the loyal Happy
his six months in the Bastile!"
"En passant," if nothing else, would have revealed to Joe, in this
imitation of a better trick, the hand of Eugene. And, little doubt, he
would have agreed with Squire Buckalew in the Squire's answer to the
easily expected comment of Mr. Arp.
"Sometimes," said Eskew, "I think that 'Gene Bantry is jest a leetle
bit spiderier than he is lazy. That's the first thing he's written in
the Tocsin this month--one of the boys over there told me. He wrote it
out of spite against Joe; but he'd ought to of done better. If his
spite hadn't run away with what mind he's got, he'd of said that both
Joe Louden and that tramp Fear ought to of had ten years!"
"'Gene Bantry didn't write that out of spite," answered Buckalew. "He
only thought he saw a chance to be kind of funny and please Judge Pike.
The Judge has always thought Joe was a no-account--"
"Ain't he right?" cried Mr. Arp.
"_I_ don't say he ain't." Squire Buckalew cast a glance at Mr. Brown,
the clerk, and, perceiving that he was listening, added, "The Judge
always IS right!"
"Yes, sir!" said Colonel Flitcroft.
"I can't stand up for Joe Louden to any extent, but I don't think he
done wrong," Buckalew went on, recovering, "when he paid this man
Fear's fine."
"You don't!" exclaimed Mr. Arp. "Why, haven't you got gumption enough
to see--"
"Look here, Eskew," interposed his antagonist. "How many friends have
you got that hate to hear folks talk bad about you?"
"Not a one!" For once Eskew's guard was down, and his consistency led
him to destruction. "Not a one! It ain't in human nature. They're
bound to enjoy it!"
"Got any friends that would FIGHT for you?"
Eskew walked straight into this hideous trap. "No! There ain't a dozen
men ever LIVED that had! Caesar was a popular man, but he didn't have
a soul to help him when the crowd lit on him, and I'll bet old Mark
Antony was mighty glad they got him out in the yard before it
happened,--HE wouldn't have lifted a finger without a gang behind him!
Why, all Peter himself could do was to cut off an ear that wasn't no
use to anybody. What are you tryin' to get AT?"
The Squire had him; and paused, and stroked his chin, to make the ruin
complete. "Then I reckon you'll have to admit," he murmured, "that,
while I ain't defendin' Joe Louden's character, it was kind of proper
for him to stand by a feller that wouldn't hear nothin' against him,
and fought for him as soon as he DID hear it!"
Eskew Arp rose from his chair and left the hotel. It was the only
morning in all the days of the conclave when he was the first to leave.
Squire Buckalew looked after the retreating figure, total triumph
shining brazenly from his spectacles. "I expect," he explained,
modestly, to the others,--"I expect I don't think any more of Joe
Louden than he does, and I'll be glad when Canaan sees the last of him
for good; but sometimes the temptation to argue with Eskew does lead me
on to kind of git the better of him."
When Happy Fear had suffered--with a give-and-take simplicity of
patience--his allotment of months in durance, and was released and sent
into the streets and sunshine once more, he knew that his first duty
lay in the direction of a general apology to Joe. But the young man
was no longer at Beaver Beach; the red-bearded proprietor dwelt alone
there, and, receiving Happy with scorn and pity, directed him to
retrace his footsteps to the town.
"Ye must have been in the black hole of incarceration indeed, if ye
haven't heard that Mr. Louden has his law-office on the Square, and his
livin'-room behind the office. It's in that little brick buildin'
straight acrost from the sheriff's door o' the jail--ye've been
neighbors this long time! A hard time the boy had, persuadin' any one
to rent to him, but by payin' double the price he got a place at last.
He's a practisin' lawyer now, praise the Lord! And all the boys and
girls of our acquaintance go to him with their troubles. Ye'll see him
with a murder case to try before long, as sure as ye're not worth yer
salt! But I expect ye can still call him by his name of Joe, all the
same!"
It was a bleak and meagre little office into which Mr. Fear ushered
himself to offer his amends. The cracked plaster of the walls was bare
(save for dust); there were no shelves; the fat brown volumes, most of
them fairly new, were piled in regular columns upon a cheap pine table;
there was but one window, small-paned and shadeless; an inner door of
this sad chamber stood half ajar, permitting the visitor unreserved
acquaintance with the domestic economy of the tenant; for it disclosed
a second room, smaller than the office, and dependent upon the window
of the latter for air and light. Behind a canvas camp-cot, dimly
visible in the obscurity of the inner apartment, stood a small
gas-stove, surmounted by a stew-pan, from which projected the handle of
a big tin spoon, so that it needed no ghost from the dead to whisper
that Joseph Louden, attorney-at-law, did his own cooking. Indeed, he
looked it!
Upon the threshold of the second room reposed a small, worn,
light-brown scrub-brush of a dog, so cosmopolitan in ancestry that his
species was almost as undeterminable as the cast-iron dogs of the Pike
Mansion. He greeted Mr. Fear hospitably, having been so lately an
offcast of the streets himself that his adoption had taught him to lose
only his old tremors, not his hopefulness. At the same time Joe rose
quickly from the deal table, where he had been working with one hand in
his hair, the other splattering ink from a bad pen.
"Good for you, Happy!" he cried, cheerfully. "I hoped you'd come to see
me to-day. I've been thinking about a job for you."
"What kind of a job?" asked the visitor, as they shook hands. "I need
one bad enough, but you know there ain't nobody in Canaan would gimme
one, Joe."
Joe pushed him into one of the two chairs which completed the furniture
of his office. "Yes, there is. I've got an idea--"
"First," broke in Mr. Fear, fingering his shapeless hat and fixing his
eyes upon it with embarrassment,--"first lemme say what I come here to
say. I--well--" His embarrassment increased and he paused, rubbing the
hat between his hands.
"About this job," Joe began. "We can fix it so--"
"No," said Happy. "You lemme go on. I didn't mean fer to cause you no
trouble when I lit on that loud-mouth, 'Nashville'; I never thought
they'd git me, or you'd be dragged in. But I jest couldn't stand him
no longer. He had me all wore out--all evening long a-hintin' and
sniffin' and wearin' that kind of a high-smile 'cause they made so much
fuss over you. And then when we got clear in town he come out with it!
Said you was too quiet to suit HIM--said he couldn't see nothin' TO
you! 'Well,' I says to myself, 'jest let him go on, jest one more,' I
says, 'then he gits it.' And he did. Said you tromped on his foot on
purpose, said he knowed it,--when the Lord-a'mightiest fool on earth
knows you never tromped on no one! Said you was one of the po'rest
young sports he ever see around a place like the Beach. You see, he
thought you was jest one of them fool 'Bloods' that come around raisin'
a rumpus, and didn't know you was our friend and belonged out there,
the same as me or Mike hisself. 'Go on,' I says to myself, 'jest one
more!' 'HE better go home to his mamma,' he says; 'he'll git in
trouble if he don't. Somebody 'll soak him if he hangs around in MY
company. _I_ don't like his WAYS.' Then I HAD to do it. There jest
wasn't nothin' LEFT--but I wouldn't of done you no harm by it--"
"You didn't do me any harm, Happy."
"I mean your repitation."
"I didn't have one--so nothing in the world could harm it. About your
getting some work, now--"
"I'll listen," said Happy, rather suspiciously.
"You see," Joe went on, growing red, "I need a sort of janitor here--"
"What fer?" Mr. Fear interrupted, with some shortness.
"To look after the place."
"You mean these two rooms?"
"There's a stairway, too," Joe put forth, quickly. "It wouldn't be any
sinecure, Happy. You'd earn your money; don't be afraid of that!"
Mr. Fear straightened up, his burden of embarrassment gone from him,
transferred to the other's shoulders.
"There always was a yellow streak in you, Joe," he said, firmly.
"You're no good as a liar except when you're jokin'. A lot you need a
janitor! You had no business to pay my fine; you'd ort of let me worked
it out. Do you think my eyes ain't good enough to see how much you
needed the money, most of all right now when you're tryin' to git
started? If I ever take a cent from you, I hope the hand I hold out
fer it 'll rot off."
"Now don't say that, Happy."
"I don't want a job, nohow!" said Mr. Fear, going to the door; "I don't
want to work. There's plenty ways fer me to git along without that.
But I've said what I come here to say, and I'll say one thing more.
Don't you worry about gittin' law practice. Mike says you're goin' to
git all you want--and if there ain't no other way, why, a few of us 'll
go out and MAKE some fer ye!"
These prophecies and promises, over which Joe chuckled at first, with
his head cocked to one side, grew very soon, to his amazement, to wear
a supernatural similarity to actual fulfilment. His friends brought
him their own friends, such as had sinned against the laws of Canaan,
those under the ban of the sheriff, those who had struck in anger,
those who had stolen at night, those who owed and could not pay, those
who lived by the dice, and to his other titles to notoriety was added
that of defender of the poor and wicked. He found his hands full,
especially after winning his first important case--on which occasion
Canaan thought the jury mad, and was indignant with the puzzled Judge,
who could not see just how it had happened.
Joe did not stop at that. He kept on winning cases, clearing the
innocent and lightening the burdens of the guilty; he became the most
dangerous attorney for the defence in Canaan; his honorable brethren,
accepting the popular view of him, held him in personal contempt but
feared him professionally; for he proved that he knew more law than
they thought existed; nor could any trick him--failing which, many
tempers were lost, but never Joe's. His practice was not all criminal,
as shown by the peevish outburst of the eminent Buckalew (the Squire's
nephew, esteemed the foremost lawyer in Canaan), "Before long, there
won't be any use trying to foreclose a mortgage or collect a
note--unless this shyster gets himself in jail!"
The wrath of Judge Martin Pike was august--there was a kind of
sublimity in its immenseness--on a day when it befell that the shyster
stood betwixt him and money.
That was a monstrous task--to stand between these two and separate
them, to hold back the hand of Martin Pike from what it had reached out
to grasp. It was in the matter of some tax-titles which the magnate
had acquired, and, in court, Joe treated the case with such horrifying
simplicity that it seemed almost credible that the great man had
counted upon the ignorance and besottedness of Joe's client--a
hard-drinking, disreputable old farmer--to get his land away from him
without paying for it. Now, as every one knew such a thing to be
ludicrously impossible, it was at once noised abroad in Canaan that Joe
had helped to swindle Judge Pike out of a large sum of money--it was
notorious that the shyster could bamboozle court and jury with his
tricks; and it was felt that Joe Louden was getting into very deep
waters indeed. THIS was serious: if the young man did not LOOK OUT, he
might find himself in the penitentiary.
The Tocsin paragraphed him with a fine regularity after this, usually
opening with a Walrus-and-the-Carpenter gravity: "The time has come
when we must speak of a certain matter frankly," or, "At last the time
has arrived when the demoralization of the bar caused by a certain
criminal lawyer must be dealt with as it is and without gloves." Once
when Joe had saved a half-witted negro from "the extreme penalty" for
murder, the Tocsin had declared, with great originality: "This is just
the kind of thing that causes mobs and justifies them. If we are to
continue to permit the worst class of malefactors to escape the
consequences of their crimes through the unwholesome dexterities and
the shifty manipulations and technicalities of a certain criminal
lawyer, the time will come when an outraged citizenry may take the
enforcement of the law in its own hands. Let us call a spade a spade.
If Canaan's streets ever echo with the tread of a mob, the fault lies
upon the head of Joseph Louden, who has once more brought about a
miscarriage of justice...."
Joe did not move into a larger office; he remained in the little room
with its one window and its fine view of the jail; his clients were
nearly all poor, and many of his fees quite literally nominal. Tatters
and rags came up the narrow stairway to his door--tatters and rags and
pitiful fineries: the bleared, the sodden, the flaunting and rouged,
the furtive and wary, some in rags, some in tags, and some--the
sorriest--in velvet gowns. With these, the distressed, the
wrong-doers, the drunken, the dirty, and the very poor, his work lay
and his days and nights were spent.
Ariel had told Roger Tabor that in time Joe might come to be what the
town thought him, if it gave him no other chance. Only its dinginess
and evil surrounded him; no respectable house was open to him; the
barrooms--except that of the "National House"--welcomed him gratefully
and admiringly. Once he went to church, on a pleasant morning when
nice girls wear pretty spring dresses; it gave him a thrill of delight
to see them, to be near clean, good people once more. Inadvertently, he
took a seat by his step-mother, who rose with a slight rustle of silk
and moved to another pew; and it happened, additionally, that this was
the morning that the minister, fired by the Tocsin's warnings, had
chosen to preach on the subject of Joe himself.
The outcast returned to his own kind. No lady spoke to him upon the
street. Mamie Pike had passed him with averted eyes since her first
meeting with him, but the shunning and snubbing of a young man by a
pretty girl have never yet, if done in a certain way, prevented him
from continuing to be in love with her. Mamie did it in the certain
way. Joe did not wince, therefore it hurt all the more, for blows from
which one cringes lose much of their force.
The town dog had been given a bad name, painted solid black from head
to heel. He was a storm centre of scandal; the entrance to his dingy
stairway was in square view of the "National House," and the result is
imaginable. How many of Joe's clients, especially those sorriest of
the velvet gowns, were conjectured to ascend his stairs for reasons
more convivial than legal! Yes, he lived with his own kind, and, so
far as the rest of Canaan was concerned, might as well have worn the
scarlet letter on his breast or branded on his forehead.
When he went about the streets he was made to feel his condition by the
elaborate avoidance, yet furtive attention, of every respectable person
he met; and when he came home to his small rooms and shut the door
behind him, he was as one who has been hissed and shamed in public and
runs to bury his hot face in his pillow. He petted his mongrel
extravagantly (well he might!), and would sit with him in his rooms at
night, holding long converse with him, the two alone together. The dog
was not his only confidant. There came to be another, a more and more
frequent partner to their conversations, at last a familiar spirit.
This third came from a brown jug which Joe kept on a shelf in his
bedroom, a vessel too frequently replenished. When the day's work was
done he shut himself up, drank alone and drank hard. Sometimes when the
jug ran low and the night was late he would go out for a walk with his
dog, and would awake in his room the next morning not remembering where
he had gone or how he had come home. Once, after such a lapse of
memory, he woke amazed to find himself at Beaver Beach, whither, he
learned from the red-bearded man, Happy Fear had brought him, having
found him wandering dazedly in a field near by. These lapses grew more
frequent, until there occurred that which was one of the strange things
of his life.
It was a June night, a little more than two years after his return to
Canaan, and the Tocsin had that day announced the approaching marriage
of Eugene Bantry and his employer's daughter. Joe ate nothing during
the day, and went through his work clumsily, visiting the bedroom shelf
at intervals. At ten in the evening he went out to have the jug
refilled, but from the moment he left his door and the fresh air struck
his face, he had no clear knowledge of what he did or of what went on
about him until he woke in his bed the next morning.
And yet, whatever little part of the soul of him remained, that night,
still undulled, not numbed, but alive, was in some strange manner
lifted out of its pain towards a strange delight. His body was an
automaton, his mind in bondage, yet there was a still, small
consciousness in him which knew that in his wandering something
incredible and unexpected was happening. What this was he did not
know, could not see, though his eyes were open, could not have told
himself any more than a baby could tell why it laughs, but it seemed
something so beautiful and wonderful that the night became a night of
perfume, its breezes bearing the music of harps and violins, while
nightingales sang from the maples that bordered the streets of Canaan.
X