The Just And The Unjust Page 10

2

  At Locktown, in the basin below the old locks, Ben Wister turned the barge around. The whitewashed fieldstone walls of the Locktown Inn, a big place with long sheds and stables built when traffic on the canal was heavy, still stood above the basin. Most of the building had now fallen into disrepair. Nobody had stopped or eaten there for years; but the Inn bar still did business, and it had other accommodations, not all that could be desired, but, by arrangement of the Club's secretary with the proprietor's wife, prepared as well as possible, and better than nothing.

  While Ben swore at his mules and worked with a pole, a number of women went up for a minute, and a number of men visited the taproom to see whether the beer there was as bad as what they had on board, or worse. Abner, who had stayed with Joe Jackman to give Ben a hand with the boat, thought that he couldn't remember a more beautiful night. The beauty, helped perhaps by beer, seemed to swell the heart and stretch the nerves until they rang with pleasure. Abner sat with Joe Jackman against the low stern bulwark by the tiller while moonlight bright enough to read by fell on them. The tops of the great trees above the locks were frosted grey. On the tow path the waiting mules cast exact black shadows. The Inn's moonlit stone walls were intensely white, a chalky candescence brighter than the yellow squares of the taproom windows. Under the deep shade of the awning Abner could hear the quiet voices, see the moving cigarette ends, of the people still on board. Over the water a delicious breeze stirred. 'Pretty nice,' he said to Joe.

  'Yeah,' said Joe, 'and not even any mosquitoes.' He got up. 'Want some beer?' he said.

  'If you get it.'

  Sitting alone, Abner looked at the moon. Up in the awning shadow someone picked the strings of a musical instrument — Adelaide Maurer, since the instrument was a mandolin — and the thin, tinkling notes began to arrange themselves, trying for a tune, while one or two voices helped, singing tentatively: 'Every time my honey leaves me, I get the blues —' Then, dissatisfied, they broke off, arguing about how it really went.

  Abner listened, surprised, not sure how old that song was, but remembering it perfectly. During his childhood there had been a phonograph record of it, among a number of records which, with pleasure in the noise but little interest, he often played, trying to kill some of the endless time of those days —vacant hours of a rainy morning or a winter afternoon, or the too long pause after supper on a summer evening before it finally got dark. From the corner of the living-room the mahogany veneer victrola, almost as tall as, and bigger than, Abner, poured out the rapid tinny music, against which a voice, rapid and tinny, too, suddenly sang; while Abner fidgeted, looking around the room in the greyness of the rainy day, or watching the light reflected on the ceiling from the snowy lawn, or staring through the screened windows at the June dusk. Adelaide, who was older, might remember the tune as one they played at the first dances she went to; and, recalling it, she thought of — what?

  Bill Maurer, if he had been Adelaide's honey, left her, all right; but, by then, Bill's leaving was a relief and even a joy; and Adelaide wanted nothing so much as the divorce that would finally rid her of him. As counsel Abner had handled one or two divorces; and sat as Master in one or two more, so patterns of the change from wanting to not wanting, from attraction to revulsion, and the budget of sorrows — first quarrels, disappointments, humiliations, idle tears, bitter speeches — implicit in the change, were known to him. The primary trouble was the same. Differences were only in detail. When Adelaide married Bill Maurer, when Cousin Mary married Jared Wacker, when what was to be the petitioner in any action sub sur divorce married what was to be the respondent, someone had married someone that he or she (usually she) did not really know. Ruling out occasional cool moves to get money or deliberate resolves to take a last or only chance, it would seem that those about to marry avoided rather than sought real knowledge; and were content to investigate nothing but their own feelings; and were satisfied if, among their feelings, they discovered some truth, such as: every time my honey leaves me, I get the blues.

  Abner did not mean to make fun of such truths. He had experienced thuir impact. Long ago at law school when he tried — how callowly, how fervently! — to work into the hard schedule of his last year time enough for a Boston girl named Eunice Stockton, the incontinent force of those truths had surprised and tormented him; and their irremediable ache had filled him with despair when he began to realize that it was all coming to nothing.

  Of course, all having come to nothing, and a nothing so absolute, and reached so long ago that Eunice Stockton's name, out of mind since he did not know when, made him start, Abner could be sure now that those forces would spend themselves and that those aches could be remedied. This was wisdom, the eschatology of what is true in the long run, and better than rubies; but things Abner knew now could not affect what Abner had felt then, and the feeling made it no thanks to him, nor to his prudence, nor to his common sense, that he was not to-day married to Eunice Stockton.

  The thought of Eunice dismissed itself, being without present interest for him; but a melancholy remained. From the thought of Eunice — though no more than from the disinterested thought of Adelaide Maurer's unhappy marriage; perhaps, no more than from the tune on the mandolin with its same assurance that everything could be counted on to die —the moonlight took a superinduced sadness. Abner found himself thinking, still at random, of Howell and Basso and Leming in their cells at the jail, with the same moonlight through the bars. It was no night to be in jail. Probably it was no night, either, to sit, like his father, alone trying to read, or, little better, playing cribbage with Aunt Myrt. Abner thought of Earl Foulke, and of how he had not been entirely above board with Marty; and how it would have been better if he had been. He thought of the talk with Jesse Gearhart; and he did not actually care what Jesse thought, or whether Jesse was pleased or displeased, or liked him or didn't like him; yet he could see the difficulty or misunderstanding waiting there in plain view, a sort of ox in the road, which Abner on his way to the future would have to deal with — and perhaps deal with very soon, if Marty were really getting ready to go to the Attorney General's office.

  From the barge-side a couple of planks had been laid to the bank. Hearing steps, Abner turned his head and saw Bonnie. She was just coming down from the Inn. She walked with easy light erectness, not looking at him; but something, he did not know what, told him that she had been looking at him until a moment ago, and his spirits lifted. The end of the plank was hardly a yard away, and when she reached it, he said, 'Feel better?'

  'Don't be coarse!' she answered.

  He patted the deck beside him, and she poised a moment, hesitating. Then she stepped off the bulwark and came up. Holding her skirt in under her pretty knees she seated herself, not too close to him. Joe Jackman, by the beer keg, saw her, and called, 'Have some suds, Mis' Drummond?'

  'No, thanks, Joe,' she said. 'Yes. 'I will.'

  Abner said, 'I have to get off at Waltons to pick my car up. Suppose you get off, too; and I'll take you home.'

  'No. I have to take mother home.'

  'She could hitch-hike, couldn't she?' Abner said. 'Not, of course, that I object to her company; but —'

  'No. I can't. I drove the Ormsbees' station wagon down.'

  'You mean you're still mad?' said Abner contentedly.

  'Yes,' she said. She gazed at him with defiance, her lips pressed tight together. 'Oh!' she said. She gave way and laughed. 'How can anyone stay mad at you, you dope!'

  'What you need,' said Abner, picking up her left hand and inspecting it, 'is a ring. You know. Not too expensive. Then when you felt mad, you'd have something to give back to me.'

  'No. And I'm not engaged to you. Did you tell Cousin Philander I was?'

  'On the contrary,' Abner said, 'he told me. He asked me if we'd had a row. He said it was high time I got married. Wait!' She tried to pull her hand away; but he held it. 'Is that what you're — you were mad about?'

  'No. Not that I don't mind what Cousin Philander th
inks. He's sweet. I mind what you think.' With a quick motion she got her hand away.

  'And what do I think?' said Abner.

  'You think you can just —'

  'Do I intrude?' said Joe Jackman. He stood over them, holding the beer mugs. His shadow fell on Bonnie's linen skirt.

  'Yes,' said Abner.

  'No, you don't!' Bonnie said. 'Thanks, Joe.'

  She took the mug in both hands and brought it to her lips. It was not a gesture that might be expected to stir the heart; but, like the ordinary tones of Bonnie's voice, her ordinary gestures were moving to Abner. Perpetually fresh, they were familiar, too. They were the tones and gestures of the thin quiet child who had lived several years in the same house with him, long ago. Bonnie had been too young — almost six years younger —to deserve actual notice; and he had little occasion to notice her, for she was shy and retiring and never bothered him. He saw her at meals, and sometimes, distantly, playing with her dolls in the summer house, or pedalling a bicycle on the curved paths through the shrubbery. He had not needed to be told (though he was told) never to do or say anything that would make Bonnie feel that he wasn't glad to have her there, or that it wasn't just as much her home as his.

  When Abner returned on a vacation from college and found Bonnie gone, after that last row of Cousin Mary's, it would be too much to say that he missed her; but, on the other hand, he had noticed her more than he realized. He remembered her in the press and hush of his mother's funeral, looking like a child with her child's dark blue hat and curls on her coat collar, coming up to him. In an agony of constraint, her lifted face scarlet, her voice insecure, she said how sorry she was.

  When Abner returned on vacations from law school he found that Bonnie had unexpectedly grown up. He took her to a couple of dances; because he liked her, and because she did not seem to have much fun; and most of all because it was easier to take her than any other girl. Any other girl might think he meant something that he did not mean, since, during that last year when he was home for the holidays, and during the year or so following when he was home all the time, he was busy being true to Eunice Stockton in Boston. When all was over with Eunice, Abner felt less inclined than ever to start anything serious with local girls his own age; and the simplest way to avoid it was to continue taking Bonnie around. As time went on, and he heard indirectly that Bonnie had more than once turned down boys who asked her to parties because he always took her, Abner saw that, however easy and agreeable for him, it was very unfair to her; and finally he spoke to her about it, driving her home early one morning after the spring cotillion at the Calumet Club. She said, 'I like going with you.' After a moment, she added,' Are you getting tired of taking me?'

  'No,' he said, 'but I thought —'

  'No,' she said, her voice suddenly strangled, 'no, you're wrong. You don't think. You don't use your head at all. Why do you think I'm here? Do you think it's because nobody else ever asked me? Do you think —'

  'I thought,' he said, 'that you thought I was the next thing to your grandfather.'

  It was not however possible to do anything about it immediately. Abner had just been appointed assistant district attorney, and it meant, while he learned his job, that he had less time for his own practice and temporarily earned less money. Bonnie had her position at the school and because of her mother, needed it. Their relationship, though fundamentally changed, did not change very much outwardly. It was simply recognized that, in the local usage, they were going together; a status that could subsist, if necessary, a long time without prejudice to the general assumption that they would be married. They took it for granted, and everyone who knew them, like Joe Jackman, took it for granted.

  It was what Joe meant when, still standing, he said, 'I suppose I can sit somewhere else if you have a private fight you want to finish.'

  'It's finished,' Abner said. 'I won.'

  'Did he?' said Joe to Bonnie.

  'He has the hide of a rhinoceros,' Bonnie said. 'He just goes lumbering along without a care in the world —' She set down her beer mug, looked vainly about, and then wiped her mouth on the back of her hand. Laughing, Abner brought a handkerchief from his breast pocket, took the hand, and wiped it. 'You blow it off,' he said. 'What would you do without me?.'

  Ben Wister yelled at his mules, and the barge began to move.

  In immediate response came other yells, wilder and louder. Down the slope from the Inn, gambolling in the moonlight, rushed Harry Wurts, his head decorated with maple leaves. He had somehow possessed himself of a harmonica, which he blew rather than played. Reaching the tow path, he jumped on board safely.

  After him, pell-mell, hallooing and whooping, came Dick Nyce and Mark Irwin. Mark flung himself, plainly with intention, short of the stern and struck the water with a prodigious splash.

  'Throw him the anchor!' shouted Harry. 'Blow the man down!'

  Mark came to the surface, gave a roar and struck out, swimming after the barge; but he made little progress and soon he touched bottom and clambered streaming up the bank. Dick Nyce, on the tow path, was doubled up helplessly, convulsed with laughter, so Mark rushed at him and pushed him in.

  'The damn fools!' said Joe Jackman. 'Boy, are they going to feel good to-morrow!'

  It could be seen that his sentiment was generally shared; but Harry Wurts, throwing his maple leaves overboard, said, 'That's what I say! Only, why wait till to-morrow? Sit near Joe, and feel bad right now!' By way of dismissing these monkey-shines, the mandolin sounded under the awning and several voices began to sing: 'Last night I was dreaming of thee, Love, was dreaming ...'

  Harry Wurts, hearing it, groaned and covered his ears; but the older people liked it, and the volume increased. The barge glided on, the bow ripples running silver, the moon behind lifting higher above the narrow water. At farm-houses across the fields the aroused dogs barked and barked as the singing floated to them faintly, moving back toward Childerstown.

  3

  On its hill Childerstown extended indistinctly, a dull shine of moonlight on the ranges of slate roofs, the few towers and many treetops bathed in pale radiance. Abner, driving up the Broad Street pike, cut off by the great shaded park of Beulah Cemetery to go home a shorter way. In Beulah were graves whose denizens had been laid there in the seventeenth century; but about 1850 the bounds were much enlarged by avenues extended across the neighbouring fields and planted with hard maples. These trees now made a fine show, serenely quartering the jumble of plinths and monoliths, of mean little temple-shaped mausoleums, or crosses and urns and angels, that seemed to show how all the dead had been in life vain and pretentious, and in death left a memory cherished by imbeciles and vulgarians. Abner thought that he would rather be buried, if he had any say about it, down in the yard of the old Friends Meeting House; but since the Coateses were Presbyterians this was unlikely; and furthermore he was amply provided for in Beulah, where the Coates plots, purchased with economical foresight at the time of the enlargement, had room for a dozen more ready — even, as in the case of the four-ton granite block over Abner's mother, waiting. Balancing her name, the Judge's was cut, and when Abner's father died all they had to do was fill in the second date.

  Abner drove by the silent, mostly dark brick houses of North Court Street. The square stone facade of the courthouse lifted above the street lights and the dark trees. At the corner before the county administration building Abner saw the uniformed figure of Bill Ortt, the chief of the three Childerstown policemen, crossing toward the obelisk of the Civil War monument on which moonlight fell so bright that the names of battles, raised in relief on the surfaces of the shaft, could be read—Spottsylvania, Brandy Station, Cold Harbor. Bill Ortt recognized the car and lifted a hand to Abner. Moonlight glinted on the big slate roof of the courtroom and a few lights burned in the jail behind.

  Abner drove out West Court Street, past the less frequent houses, with not a car on the road nor a person in sight. Turning between the stone gateposts he could see one light at home, in
the lower hall; but the house, big, blocky in the shadows, was dark everywhere else. He tiptoed up into the cavern of the veranda and slid his key into the lock.

  As he opened the door, the telephone rang suddenly, like a signal; and he jumped to catch it before it woke everyone up. In the dark corner under the stairs he bent and said 'Hello'.

  'That you, Ab? Hope I didn't wake you up.'

  'I was out. I just got in. Who is it?'

  'Pete Wiener. Look, Ab; there's just been a honey of an accident on route sixteen. One driver killed, and the other one I have here, charged with manslaughter. I don't really think it was so much his fault, what they say —'

  As justices of the peace went, Pete Wiener at Newmarket was a good one, and when he didn't know what to do you could depend on him to find out before he proceeded. Abner said, 'But the other fellow's dead?'

  'Cut his head right clean off,' Wiener said. 'You never saw such a mess. Now, what I want to know is, I have to hold my man for the coroner, don't I? He thinks he can put up bail. He's got an auto club card —'

  'No. You can't take recognizance in manslaughter, Pete.'

  'Well, what'll he have to do to get out? He wants to know, naturally.'

  'There's nothing he can do to-night. He'll have to go to jail. If he wants to get out before the inquest, what he'll have to do is petition for a writ of habeas corpus in order to be admitted to bail. Understand? You can draw one up for him and send it over to Judge Irwin tomorrow.'

  'About what I figured. What'll I do with him meanwhile? I got the state police here, now. Should I give him to them?'

  'Better tell them to bring him right up here to jail,' Abner said. 'The Judge doesn't like them holding people at the sub-station; and he'll direct the writ to the sheriff in the morning, so the sheriff'd better have him. Make sure he isn't hurt, Pete. Sometimes they are, but don't know.'

  'Yes, I will, Ab. Thanks very much.'

  Abner hung up, switched out the hall light, and began quietly to climb the long stairs. The door of his father's bedroom was ajar, and as he turned at the top, Abner heard the low, thickened voice, 'That you, son?'