I.
The police court in Boston is an upper room of the temple of justice, and is a large, square, dismal-complexioned chamber, with the usual seams and cracks configuring its walls and ceilings; its high, curtainless windows were long glares of sunless light, crossed with the fine drizzle of an easterly rain on the morning of my visit. About one-third of the floor is allotted to spectators, and supplied with benches of penitential severity; the remaining space is occupied by a series of curved tables set in a horse-shoe, and by a raised platform, railed off from the auditorium, as I may call it, and supporting in successive gradations the clerk’s desk, on a very long, narrow table, and the judge’s table and easy-chair. At either end of the table on which the clerk’s desk was placed was a bar, representing in one case the witness stand, and in the other the prisoner’s box; midway, the clerk stood within a screen of open iron-work, hemmed in with books of record and tin boxes full of docketed papers.
Outside of the railing were the desks of two officers of the court, whose proper titles my unfamiliarity with the place disables me from giving. They were both well in flesh, as I remember, and in spite of their blue flannel suits and the exercise of a wise discretion, by which one of them had discarded his waistcoat and neckcloth, they visibly suffered from the moist, close heat which the storm outside had driven into the court-room. From time to time one of them cried out, “Silence!” to quell a restive movement in the audience; and once the cravatless officer left his place, and came down to mine near the door, and drove out the boys who were sitting round me. “Leave!” he shouted. “This is no place for boys!” They went out obediently, and some others just like them came in immediately and took their places. They might have been the same boys, so far as any difference for the better in their looks went. They were not pleasant to the eye, nor to any other sense; and neither were the young men nor old men who for the rest formed the audience of this free dramatic spectacle. Their coat-collars came up above their shirt-collars; but, greasy as they were, the observer could not regret this misfit when chance gave an occasional glimpse of their linen—or their cotton, to be exact. For the most part, they wore their hair very short, and exposed necks which I should, I believe, have preferred to have covered. Under the influence of the humid heat, and with the wet they brought from the outside, they sent up a really deplorable smell. I do not know that I have a right to criticise the appearance of some of their eyes—they seemed perfectly good eyes to see with, in spite of their sinister or vacant expression and gloomy accessories; and certain scars and mutilations of the face and fingers were the affair of their owners rather than mine. Whenever they fell into talk, an officer of the court marched upon them and crushed them to silence. “This is no place for conversation,” he said; and the greater part of them had evidently no disposition or capacity for that art. I believe they were men and boys whose utmost mental effort sufficed to let their mouths hang open in the absorption of the performance, and was by no means equal to comment upon it. I fancied that they came there, day after day, the year round, and enjoyed themselves in their poor way, realizing many of the situations presented by experience of like predicaments, more than by sympathy or an effort of the imagination.
I had taken my place among them next the door, so that if my courage failed me at any time I could go out without disturbing the others. One need not be a very proud man to object to classing himself with them, and there were moments when I doubted if I could stand my fellow-spectators much longer; but these accesses of arrogance passed, as I watched the preparations for the play with the interest of a novice. There were already half a dozen policemen seated at the tables in semicircle, and chatting pleasantly together; and their number was constantly increased by new arrivals, who, as they came in, put their round-topped straw hats on one end of the semicircle, and sat down to fill out certain printed forms, which I suppose related to the arrests they had made, for they were presently handed to the clerk, who used them in calling up the cases. A little apart from the policemen was a group of young men, whom I took to be the gentlemen of the bar; among them, rather more dapper than the rest, was a colored lawyer, who afterwards, by an irony of Nemesis, appeared for some desperate and luckless defendants of the white race and of Irish accent. By and by two or three desks, placed conveniently for seeing and hearing everything against the railing on the clerk’s right, were occupied by reporters, unmistakable with their pencil and paper. Looking from them I saw that the judge’s chair was now filled by a quiet-looking gentleman, who seemed, behind his spectacles, to be communing with himself in a sad and bored anticipation. At times he leaned forward and spoke with the clerk or one of the gentlemen of the bar, and then fell back in sober meditation.
Like all other public exhibitions, the police court failed a little in point of punctuality. It was advertised to open at nine o’clock, but it was nearer ten when, after several false alarms, the clerk in a rapid, inarticulate formula declared it now opened, and invoked the blessing of God on the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Even then there was a long wait before we of the audience heard the scuffling of the feet of the prisoners on what seemed a broad stairway behind the barrier at the judge’s right, and before any of them came in sight they were commanded by the attendant policeman to sit down, and apparently did so, on the top of the stairs. The clerk now turned towards them with a sheaf of the forms which the policemen had filled out in his hand, and successively addressed them by name:—
“Larry McShane!”
“Here, sor.”
“Complained of for being drunk. Guilty or not guilty?”
“Guilty, sor.”
“Pay a fine of one dollar and costs, and stand committed to the House of Industry.”
He jotted something down on the back of each indictment, and half turned to toss it on to his desk, and then resumed the catalogue of these offenders, accusing and dooming them all in the same weary and passionless monotone.
I confess that I had at the time the strongest curiosity to see them, but it has since struck me that it was a finer effect merely to hear their voices in response, and to leave their figures and faces to the fancy. Sometimes the voice that answered “Guilty” was youthful, and sometimes, I grieve to say, it was feminine, though under the circumstances it had naturally that subdued tone which is thought such an excellent thing in woman. Usually, however, the voices were old and raucous, as if they had many times made the same plea in the same place, and they pronounced sir sor. The clerk’s sheaf of accusations being exhausted, they all apparently scuffled downstairs again. But a number must have remained, for now, after this sort of overture, the entertainment began in earnest, the actors on the scene appearing as they were summoned from the same invisible space behind the railing, which I think was probably sunk a little lower than the level of the auditorium, and which might, to humor the theatrical illusion, be regarded as the green-room.