Under the Law

by Edwina Stanton Babcock

"It was Miss Bogart who headed my cavalcade last night," said Shipman, "and she was spokeswoman for the O'Brien matter. Has she, do you think, much influence with her father?"

The young cashier put his finger-tips together. "With Bogart? Did you ever know anyone who ever had any influence with Bogart? You don't know the man; he's not modern in any sense. He has the hard and fixed ideas of crime and punishment. He believes in the Example. Punishment is his fetich. From his point of view, if he gives this young chap a life sentence, fewer old men will get shot in the back. That's Bogart's point of view." The cashier ruminated for a few moments, then added, "any jury knows it and plays upon it."

His visitor nodded, then smiled a rather dry smile. "It might, however, eventually mean more old men shot in the back," he said. Then rising, "Well, I've enjoyed our talk and thanks for helping me out with this scheme of the ransoming of Terence, by that young crowd. It is funny, but it is significant, and they mean business. They will pay a certain sum per head into your hands Saturday nights, and it goes into the O'Brien fund." The lawyer hesitated, adding in a low voice, "I need not tell you that I cannot save the chap. I know that he did the thing, but I mean to try and get a shorter sentence, twenty years perhaps," he shrugged his shoulders, adding, "and you and I know precisely what a man's life is worth after twenty years in prison."

"How about a game of golf on the Wedgewood course to-morrow? You want to get your revenge?"

They shook hands on it; the younger man looked into the dark eyes, so full of human kindness, yet so austere and lonely.

"Watts Shipman," the young cashier said slowly, "what are you doing up there on that mountain? Anything you shouldn't—home brew,—sirens?"

The lawyer laughed; he caught up his riding crop. "Come up and see; walk up, do you good to climb that far; no wine, no women, not even some of our best suppressed literature. I'm—I'm just trying," the lawyer threw back his head and drew a deep breath, "to get hold of life, real life, the kind of thing that eludes men until too late they turn and clutch for it."

The other laughed. "And so you saw wood and wash your own dishes? Wonderful realization of life!"

Shipman's mouth twisted into appreciation of the thing. "I've got a vegetable garden—raise nearly all my own produce. I've planted it in terraces half down the mountainside the way the Greeks do in Thessaly. That's a wonderful scheme for natural irrigation. Anyway," the lawyer squared away and delivered a teasing punch on his friend's chest, "I've got back a good digestion and can stretch like a tiger and feel the morning sun along my bare flanks and—and I can laugh heartily, and I've forgotten the smell of money and I've gone back to a boyish repugnance for dirty things and lying things and under-handed things." The older man cast a penetrating look into the very stuff of his friend. "Isn't it up to us to create new standards?" he asked squarely; "are you satisfied with the old? I'm not! I want clean standards, but I want 'em built on facts, not on calendar mottoes."

The other shook his head. "So do I," he said in a low tone, "but," he waved his hand to the street outside, "do you see much out there that looks like new standards? It's the calendar motto still." For a moment the two men stood in the window reading the street like a book on which figures of men and women like words told the story of the vicinity. Morris's mild, plainly-dressed women doing the morning's marketing, face, features and walk betokening a certain niggardliness with life; a complacent adjustment to the best that has been instead of an insistence upon the best that shall be. Occasional handsome cars holding peevish city faces come to the country for a great poison herb, Novelty. Young people flitting about in droves driven by insatiability and their peculiar disease, leisure and unapplied brains. One or two old forms tottering in the sunshine, pleased, interested with little trivial occurrences, yet powerful, holding the power of prestige. The usual village types, the static parson, the elastic politician, the loafers on the corner, the nameless village woman, the scoundrel village man, the sanctimonious gossips, the schools at twelve pouring out of their hoppers the little victims of all whatever good or ill might be; up and down the streets, these forms, symbols of life, moved and went about their business. But no matter what they spelled in between they wrote irrevocably on the pavements, Greed, and also Fear, and Popularity. They did not write Progress.