Under the Law

by Edwina Stanton Babcock

Wiping her eyes, the young waitress stonily piling up the silver on the tray, let drop a fork. The girl stood there looking at it. Sard tried to comfort her.

"It—it is Human Sorrow," she said awkwardly. "I think we—we don't understand sorrow as well as we ought to and I am quite powerless but Miss Aurelia and I care, Dora."

The girl said it tremulously; already she was feeling the awful gulf between a person who suffers tragedy and that other who stands by longing to help. Also Sard knew a kind of shame—for it seemed treachery to her father and the equity he maintained, to say more. What could words do? It was Sard's first experience of the great naked fact of human sorrow and shame; she knew that the only person who could help Dora would be someone who had been through a wave of tragedy like hers.

"Words," thought Sard hotly, "are disgusting. We bandy them about and pile them up like money. We exchange them like coin of the realm." The young girl, clean and defiant of emotion as a young animal, had no mature power, that amazing power borne through sorrow and sympathy, the strange power of the healing touch, else she would have touched Dora's bowed head, put a comforting hand on the heaving shoulder. She stood silent, then once more said, helplessly, "Dora, don't you believe me, that I do truly care?"

Suddenly there was a curious half shriek, the terrible leap of human emotion through the breaking discipline of lips and eyes—"Oh, I know you care——Oh, Miss Sard—but they'll jug him just the same—for life—for life! His chanst is gorn."

Dora's voice then sank to a kind of moaning soliloquy. "Oh, yes, that's what they all tell me; he's killed a man, or they say he has "—the woman shot a haggard look into the girl's face. "I've thought and thought and I know from reading the papers and all that almost any rich man's son would get off," she said it bitterly, "but that isn't it—it's something else, it's that he's only done wrong once, and now he's got to live and die with the worst—oh," moaned Dora passionately, "they'd ought to be laws to save them that's got wrong into them, not to smash 'em. For life, for life!"

No great poet could have crammed into one sentence the thing that the weeping girl crammed into these words—"for life." Gently Sard closed the door and, hardly knowing what she did, tiptoed back toward the front of the house. She looked out on the late spring foliage, on the tulips and Japanese maples a-quiver with June, on the purple fleur de lis and peonies, dewy with color against the long sparkling ribbon of the morning river ... against all that virginal clean growth with its rapturous aspiration toward the sky that feeds it, the girl heard the poor human cry, "For life—for life!"

So this was actually happening! Life, a smooth velvet delicious thing was going on in the front of Sard's home—music, pleasure, ease and beauty, while in the back part of it life was labor and anguish and shame! This was the law under which Sard's parents and their friends had lived contentedly, it was the law under which she was expected to live contentedly. "I never will," whispered the girl fiercely, "I never, never will; these are not my laws, I am not 'under' the law."

Sard, slowly leaving the kitchen, came upon her aunt. Miss Aurelia, with the finest and lightest of dusters, was performing various rituals with the legs of table and chairs; now she moved one thin hand in swirls over the piano top. "A piano collects dust so strangely," she explained, as if the piano were a sentient thing that made dust-collecting its object. "I've always been so glad to do the dusting," remarked Miss Aurelia for the hundredth time, "he—your father, of course, never notices but she—we—not that I want to criticise your mother, that would be impossible, only she-we—at that time—that is to say—in any emergency I would naturally; of course, some servants were careful and others not. I had once," said Miss Aurelia, with the air of beginning a new subject, "I had an—an aunt," she whispered the thing mysteriously, "she—er—hated dust —— Sard, you're twisting your ring—you look—is anything wrong?"