Under the Law

by Edwina Stanton Babcock

Also, Watts Shipman disappointed them. Not experienced enough to comprehend the poise and power that lay behind Shipman's calm, his deferential giving way to his "distinguished opponent," his punctilious observance of every known courtesy and tradition of the bar, they found him tepid and unconvincing. They saw their great man as rather a simple soul, apparently a negligible factor in the trial, apparently dominated by the sleek, shining country counsel for the prosecution, and did not know that those very simplicities were the earnest of his greatness. The Bunch did not know the modern function of the lawyer to hold himself rigidly from emphasis until all of the case has been digested. To work out by the slow sifting of evidence the four sides of his construction, the meticulous dotting of I's and crossing of T's, the subterfuge of the trained, technical response of witness when asked certain specific questions; in short, the suave chicanery and subtle craft that has been slowly built up around the narrowing arena where two brains tourney for the life or honor of a prisoner—these things were so much mortification of the flesh for the restive "Bunch."

One by one the slow summer mornings of the trial dragged out. One by one the "Bunch" dwindled down. Dora, trim in costume, desperate in eyes and manner, might have noticed this defection; Sard, rather listless and weary, saw it with scorn; Shipman, a slight glimmer in his eyes, observed it. But Minga and Dunstan, coming religiously together every day, both noted and registered it.

These two young people sat solemnly aloof in some communion of spirit, waiting for some revelation, what, they hardly knew. But to an imaginative onlooker they might have seemed slowly in their young hope to dim; their vaulting belief might have appeared to such an onlooker to become slowly filmed over by the long, long dust and dinginess, the hanging cobwebs, the old parchments and papers, the pomps and vanities, the emptiness and scaly dead skin of the Law.

But Dust is capable of explosion, and the two youngsters solemnly sitting there on the last day of the case gradually felt themselves slow fuses in some strange emotional bomb of their own planning. This was somewhat heightened by a note that Dunstan carried in his pocket. Once during the trial the lad took this out and showed it to his companion; the two heads bent over it, two brown hands clasped in solemn vow. Two solemn pairs of young eyes swore some consecration to a so far half-planned venture.

Minga seemed restless and scornful. She kept her eyes on the proceedings with the air of one who should say, "And this is what you call 'justice'!"

At last came the summing up for the defense, and the great lawyer rose and made his plea for the youth, who, sullen of eyes and unbelieving of spirit, sat there. The court-room was full. Watts' fame had been passed from mouth to mouth among the Trout County inhabitants and all up and down the little villages of the Hudson the lawyer's mission had been told. Private automobiles bumped along the country roads, jitneys from the ferries and from other counties deposited their loads of citizens. The country people, secure in their sense of collective virtue, untroubled with modern analyses of crime and punishment, unhampered with any passion for an adjustment of punishment to environment and education, and keen for the Roman Holiday, came to see severe sentence of imprisonment passed upon one who had forfeited his right to live among them. The jury, clean as to shave, ostentatious as to watch chain, some perfumed, some begoggled, one in hip boots, another in pearl spats, all with an expression of wisdom and virtue rather droll to anyone who knew the hidden chapters of their separate lives; in fact, the Spoon River Anthology, numbering twelve picked verses, filed into the jury box, and "twelve good men and true" mopped their foreheads and tried to look unconscious.

Outside, the summer morning was rich with promise. Butterflies sailed two and two past the branches and down into the deep grass. The leaves, turning over like little green babies on their backs, warmed their little stomachs in the sun.

The summing up was short. Terry, his half-formed young ears pricking up, heard it, only half understanding. Sard, Dunstan and Minga heard it rebelliously. Dora, like a person in a trance, heard it stonily.

The criminal had done murder, so the evidence had shown, to obtain money for adventure and to further schemes for his advancement. No motive of personal hatred or self-defense or vengeance could be found. The testimony had been full, accurate and to the point. Terry's curly, well-brushed head was on his chest. Later it was raised and the boy was staring defiantly around him like a young bull at bay and desperately knowing only one thing, how joyous, how magnificent it would be to charge!

Sard, sitting back in the court-room, looked from the boy, all the muscles of his young back taut, to her father. It was to her suddenly as if the whole court-room, all of them were, under the Judge's power of punishment, and that somehow his whole life, all the whetted flavor of his existence was to mete punishment. To the girl's daunted eyes, her father was as powerful here as he was at the breakfast table. The gray head was pompous and rawly defined against the background of the American flag; the hard-boiled eyes looked with a peculiar fixity, a muscular invariability on every witness; the nasal voice with its few comments, swift interruption and rebuke, its lifeless adjustments and refereeship of the proceedings were of an inflexible quality that the girl felt was not of convention but of a hard, unimaginative, self-secure and characteristic conceit.