The Empty Sack

by Basil King

"His motive may have been all right. I'll not dispute you there, because you'll find that legally there's a difference between motive and intent. His motive may have been to provide for his mother, just as he says. Good! No harm in that whatever. But his intent was to rob a bank and shoot the guy that came out after him. The court won't go into his motives. It'll deal only with his intent, and with what came of it."

There was more along these lines which sent Bob away with some questioning as to himself. Being of a law-respecting nature, he was anxious not to uphold the transgressor to anything like a danger point. And he ran that risk. Having undertaken to help Teddy on Jennie's account, his heart had gone out beyond what he expected to the boy himself. It was the first time he had ever been in contact with a prisoner, the first time he had ever come face to face with a lone individual against whom all the organized forces of the world were focused in condemnation. His impulse being to range himself on the weaker side, he had, in a measure, so ranged himself. He had told Teddy that he stood by him, and would continue to stand by him through thick and thin. But was he right? Had he shown the proper severity? Hadn't he been sloppy and sentimental, without sufficiently remembering that a man who had killed another man was not to be handled as a pet?

It was not common sense to treat the breaker of laws as if he hadn't broken them or as if his punishment had made him a sympathetic figure. Too facile a pity might easily become a sin against the community's best standards, and by putting himself on the weaker side a man might find himself on the worse one. Even the fact that the wrongdoer was a relative ought not to blind the eyes to his being a wrongdoer. It was his duty as a citizen, Bob argued, to support the charter of the Rights of Man as set forth in the Old Testament—thou shalt not kill—thou shalt not steal—the ideal of the New Testament, "Neither was there among them any that lacked, for they had all things common," never having been called to his attention.

As to Teddy's being a criminal born, he was not sure. Perhaps he was. Such "sports" appeared even from the most respectable stock. There was a dark tradition, never mentioned now except between Edith and himself, of a Collingham—they were not sure of the relationship—who had died in jail somewhere in the West. Of the Follett stock Bob knew nothing. Jennie was the other half of himself; but such affinities, he was sheepishly inclined to feel, dated from other worlds and other planes of existence, though finding a manifestation in this one.

But it was Jennie who gave him the lead he was in search of.

"I should think there were plenty of them to attend to that," she said, when he had expressed, as delicately as he could, his misgivings as to his own lack of rigor. "Whatever he did, and however bad it was, they've got all the power in the world to punish him, and they're going to do it. When there's just one person on earth to show him a little pity, I shouldn't think it could be too much." She added, after a second or two of silence: "He was sorry you didn't go in to see him. He missed you. I—I think he's going to cling to you just like a drowning man, you know, to a hand that's stretched out to him from a boat. Very likely he'll have to drown; but so long as the hand is there, it's—it's something."

In this speech, which was long for Jennie and betokened her growing authority, there were two or three points on which Bob pondered as he drove them homeward from the Brig. Jennie sat beside him, Lizzie in the back seat. He took the longest and prettiest ways so as to give them something like an outing.

It was the afternoon of the day on which he had seen Stenhouse, and in the interval he had been thinking out a program. Whatever the restrictions he must put upon himself with regard to the boy, his duty to protect and distract Jennie and her family was clear. Teddy had also given him to understand that, more than anything done for himself, this would contribute to his peace of mind. Done for his mother and sisters, it would be done for him, and the doer could be sure that he wasn't loosening the foundations of society. Even where there was a born criminal to be judged, and perhaps put out of the way, something was gained when the innocent could be saved to any possible degree from suffering with the guilty.

In this, too, he was not without an eye to Indiana Avenue. Though he had no experience of suburban life, he was intuitive enough to feel sure that, to the neighbors, Jennie's marriage had a "queer look," and the more so since she was not living with her husband, now that he was back from South America. To counteract this, he meant to show himself in the street as much as possible, parading his car before the door. There must be no cheap gossip as to Jennie based on lack of his devotion, even though all arrangements between her and himself were no more than provisional.

To that point, then, his course was clear. He could not console the mother, whose reason was stricken at its base, nor the three young girls whose lives were overshadowed by tragedy; but he could divert their minds from dwelling too much on calamity by bringing in a new interest. He could make it a big interest. He could enlarge the interest in proportion to their need; and, as Jennie spoke, it dawned on him that they themselves began to foresee that their need might be great indeed. "They've got all the power in the world to punish him; and they're going to do it." "He's going to cling to you like a drowning man. Very likely he'll have to drown." Jennie had had one or two interviews with Stenhouse, and perhaps had inferred from that great man's talk the difficulties of his task.