GUILTY AS CHARGED
The Jew, I take it, is essentially temperamental, whereas the Irishman is by nature sentimental; so that in the long run both of them may reach the same results by varying mental routes. This, however, has nothing to do with the story I am telling here, except inferentially.
It was trial day at headquarters. To be exact, it was the tail end of trial day at headquarters. The mills of the police gods, which grind not so slowly but ofttimes exceeding fine, were about done with their grinding; and as the last of the grist came through the hopper, the last of the afternoon sunlight came sifting in through the windows at the west, thin and pale as skim milk. One after another the culprits, patrolmen mainly, had been arraigned on charges preferred by a superior officer, who was usually a lieutenant or a captain, but once in a while an inspector, full-breasted and gold-banded, like a fat blue bumblebee. In due turn each offender had made his defense; those who were lying about it did their lying, as a rule, glibly and easily and with a certain bogus frankness very pleasing to see. Contrary to a general opinion, the Father of Lies is often quite good to his children. But those who were telling the truth were frequently shamefaced and mumbling of speech, making poor impressions.
In due turn, also, each man had been convicted or had been acquitted, yet all—the proven innocent and the adjudged guilty alike—had undergone punishment, since they all had to sit and listen to lectures on police discipline and police manners from the trial deputy. It was perhaps as well for the peace and good order of the community that the public did not attend these séances. Those classes now that are the most thoroughly and most personally governed—the pushcart pedlers, with the permanent cringing droops in their alien backs; the sinful small boys, who play baseball in the streets against the statutes made and provided; the broken old wrecks, who ambush the prosperous passer-by in the shadows of dark corners, begging for money with which to keep body and soul together—it was just as well perhaps that none of them was admitted there to see these large, firm, stern men in uniform wriggling on the punishment chair, fumbling at their buttons, explaining, whining, even begging for mercy under the lashing flail of Third Deputy Commissioner Donohue's sleety judgments.
“The only time old Donny warms up is when he's got a grudge against you,” a wit of headquarters—Larry Magee by name—had said once as he came forth from the ordeal, brushing imaginary hailstones off his shoulders. “It's always snowing hard in his soul!”
Unlike most icy-tempered men, though, Third Deputy Commissioner Donohue was addicted to speech. Dearly he loved to hear the sound of his own voice. Give to Donohue a congenial topic, such as some one's official or personal shortcomings, and a congenial audience, and he excelled mightily in saw-edged oratory, rolling his r's until the tortured consonants fairly lay on their backs and begged for mercy.
This, however, would have to be said for Deputy Commissioner Donohue—he was a hard one to fool. Himself a grayed ex-private of the force, who had climbed from the ranks step by step through slow and devious stages, he was coldly aware of every trick and device of the delinquent policeman. A new and particularly ingenious subterfuge, one that tasted of the fresh paint, might win his begrudged admiration—his gray flints of eyes would strike off sparks of grim appreciation; but then, nearly always, as though to discourage originality even in lying, he would plaster on the penalty—and the lecture—twice as thick. Wherefore, because of all these things, the newspaper men at headquarters viewed this elderly disciplinarian with mixed professional emotions. Presiding over a trial day, he made abundant copy for them, which was very good; but if the case were an important one he often prolonged it until they missed getting the result into their final editions, which, if you know anything about final editions, was very, very bad.
It was so on this particular afternoon. Here it was nearly dusk. The windows toward the east showed merely as opaque patches set against a wall of thickening gloom, and the third deputy commissioner had started in at two-thirty and was not done yet. Sparse and bony, he crouched forward on the edge of his chair, with his lean head drawn down between his leaner shoulders and his stiff stubble of hair erect on his scalp, and he looked, perching there, like a broody but vigilant old crested cormorant upon a barren rock.
Except for one lone figure of misery, the anxious bench below him was by now empty. Most of the witnesses were gone and most of the spectators, and all the newspaper men but two. He whetted a lean and crooked forefinger like a talon on the edge of the docket book, turned the page and called the last case, being the case of Patrolman James J. Rogan. Patrolman Rogan was a short horse and soon curried. For being on such and such a day, at such and such an hour, off his post, where he belonged, and in a saloon where he did not belong, sitting down, with his blouse unfastened and his belt unbuckled; and for having no better excuse, or no worse one, than the ancient tale of a sudden attack of faintness causing him to make his way into the nearest place where he might recover himself—that it happened to be a family liquor store was, he protested, a sheer accident—Patrolman Rogan was required to pay five days' pay and, moreover, to listen to divers remarks in which he heard himself likened to several things, none of them of a complimentary character.
Properly crushed and shrunken, the culprit departed thence with his uniform bagged and wrinkling upon his diminished form, and the third deputy commissioner, well pleased, on the whole, with his day's hunting, prepared to adjourn. The two lone reporters got up and made for the door, intending to telephone in to their two shops the grand total and final summary of old Donohue's bag of game.