While Bob Collingham was on his way to him Teddy was in conversation with the chaplain. For this purpose, the door had been unlocked. The visitor leaned against the door post while the prisoner stood in the narrow space between his bunk and the wall.
It was the Protestant chaplain, a tall, spare, sandy-haired man of some fifty-odd, whose yearning, spiritual face had, through long association with his flock, grown tired and disillusioned. Having sought this post from a genuine sympathy with outcast men, he suffered from their rejection. He was so sure of what would help them, and only one in a hundred ever wanted it. Even that one generally laughed at it when he got out of jail. After eighteen years of self-denying work, the worthy man was sadly pessimistic now as to prospects of reform.
For the minute he was trying to convince Teddy of the righteousness of punishment. He had been drawn to the boy partly because of his youth and good looks, but mainly on account of his callousness to his crime. He seemed to have no conscience, no notion of the difference between right and wrong. "A moral moron" was what he labeled him. The lack of ethical consciousness was the more astonishing because his antecedents had apparently been good.
"You see," he was pointing out, "you can't break the laws by which society protects itself and yet escape the moral and physical results."
But in his long, solitary hours Teddy had been thinking this out.
"Doesn't that depend upon the laws? If the law's wrong—"
"But who's to judge of that?"
"Isn't the citizen to judge of that?"
The parson smiled—his weary, spiritual smile.
"If the citizen was allowed to judge of that—"