Under the Law

by Edwina Stanton Babcock

Suddenly, as in a lovely picture, the man saw a June garden with the Ramapo Mountains back of it. He saw distant daisy fields, a little white gate, the tall wands of purple and blue canterbury bells; a little boy sat cutting out paper dolls and a woman, whose dark blue eyes were shy with him and whose voice had faltered as she had told him a story and who had shown him a picture in a locket that she had drawn up warm from her white breast. The woman's voice was always dreamily in Shipman's memory. Now it told him a story.

The story of a West African expedition that had ended fatally, disastrously, where the men died like sheep of smallpox, where George Ledyard's brother, the famous biologist, Martin Ledyard, had striven for the lives of the men, but had only been able to save three. Then Dr. Ledyard had rowed down the tropical river with the body of his dearest friend, the surgeon, Tarrant, in a canoe made from a hollow tree. The natives, having deserted them, had left the scientific party without canoes. Tarrant, Martin Ledyard's dearest friend, his brother-in-science!

There was a long silence before the lawyer looked up into the face of that man who walked up and down, his russet head erect, one arm crossed behind him on his back. Colter's face, absorbed, earnest, rational, had yet that curious look of hesitancy and bafflement that the lawyer began to know was the thing in which he had always disbelieved, the thing he had scouted, amnesia. The lawyer's knowledge of shell-shock, of trance, of the results of profound and tragic sorrow, served him now. He could no longer repudiate this evident spiritual and mental submersion.

But what would cause amnesia, apart from trying physical conditions? Not even horrible experiences in West African jungles with one's friends dying consecutively of smallpox. The loss of a man's friend? Not altogether. Illness, exposure? Not altogether. Shock? Shock?

Watts Shipman, plunged in thought, searched in his imagination for the one shock that might have shut the doors of memory. Colter, looking patiently at him, hazarded a suggestion.

"That book," motioning to it, "that book is a sort of talisman. Sometimes it brings back whole sequences of memory, and then that letter that you see speaks of men of science, who are living to-day, as if I and the writer had known them together."

Watts laughed, and turned away with something like a sneer.

"Awfully clever, old chap. I've no doubt you've done this successfully many times, but," the lawyer turned abruptly, "I have seen a good deal, you know." Sharply, "Now drop all this memory-camouflage. Tell me who you are, why you're here, what knocked you out, and I'll give you any old job you want—come," said Watts authoritatively. "You've been a cultivated man, no doubt about that. You've traveled; you're a 'has-been'! You've come a cropper some way—drink, dope, women," he looked narrowly into the still white face. "Some disgrace, perhaps some tragedy—you're ashamed of something."

It was so brutal, so abrupt, that it had its immediate result. There was a long and very curious silence. It was as if the two men staring at each other had been fighting a secret fight under the open one of incredulity and effort to reveal. Both of them under the threshold of intelligence knew what that secret fight was. It was Sard! All harmony had vanished. Something hard and unlovely had taken its place. It was as if the two worked desperately to create a wall between them and the wall was now finished. It was an inevitable wall of a girl's fresh vibrant personality.