The Just And The Unjust Read online

  'I have to go. I have to get home to lunch. Are you coming this evening?'

  'You know I am,' said Abner. 'Look, Bonnie —'

  'Well, all right. I'll see you then.'

  Gilford Hughes, the prothonotary, came in, his grey moustache drooping. He sighed with the heat. 'Marty's looking for you, Ab,' he said. 'Hello, Bonnie! My, don't you look pretty in all those checks! Nice and cool! Isn't this a scorcher of a day! Wish I were down at the shore!'

  'Wish I were, too,' said Bonnie.

  'There, now,' Gifford Hughes said, winking at Abner. 'If I were your age, Ab, I'd know what to say to that.'

  'What you say now is pretty nice,' Bonnie said. 'Good-bye, Mr. Hughes.' She went out and passed quickly down the hall to the sunlight in the big door.

  Abner turned and went back to the empty courtroom. A burst of muffled laughter sounded from the closed door of the Attorneys' Room, and Abner went in. Bunting sat in the corner looking at a copy of a New York paper someone had left there. George Stacey was leaning against the mantel of the disused fireplace. Sitting on the old leather settee near the lavatory door was Jacob Riordan, generally allowed to be the best lawyer in Childerstown; and, to Abner's surprise, Jesse Gearhart.

  'Gentlemen,' Abner said, bowing. Harry was sitting on the oval table, facing John Clark who occupied the principal armchair. Over his shoulder, Mr. Clark said, 'What do you think of a question like that, Jake? Impertinent, I call it.'

  'All I want to know, Mr. Clark,' Harry said, 'is whose woman she was. Didn't she confess to you? Didn't you conduct an examination in your office — I mean, verbal, of course? I need hardly say that my interest is purely scientific. And then, besides that, I have a dirty mind.'

  John Clark was heh-hehing, regarding Harry under his drooping eyelids with that old man's this-boy-isn't-such-a-damned-fool-after-all look. 'What a client tells me or doesn't tell me is locked for ever in this bosom,' he said.

  Jacob Riordan said, 'What d'you want to mix up in it for, Johnny? It just makes everything longer. Wish they'd get through with these foreigners — going to have Miscellaneous Court next Monday, Marty?'

  'We'll have court,' Bunting said, throwing the paper aside. 'But we won't be through the list.'

  'Well, when are you going to finish this thing, this murder?'

  'To-morrow, I hope. If Stacey and Wurts don't obstruct matters any better than they're obstructing them now.'

  'I never saw anybody so damned bloodthirsty as the district attorney,' Harry said. 'Due process for him is a kind of legal bum's-rush. It isn't decent.'

  'You want to see me?' Abner said, tapping his knee.

  'Not any more. I have arranged matters with Mr, Bunting. Come on. Let's eat! My God, the time wasted around here! Enough to feed a French family for a year —'

  'Ab,' said Jacob Riordan, 'I'm going to represent this Hamilton Mason, the boy in the accident last night. Marty said you talked to Pete Wiener about it. I'm going in to see him now. Anything I ought to know?'

  'Not that I can tell you,' Abner said. 'The state police's charge is manslaughter, I understand. If it's the way Pete seemed to think it was, I guess we'll' — he looked at Bunting inquiringly — 'be glad to do what we can to get it through as quickly as possible. I suppose it may develop at the coroner's inquest that there's no reason to hold him, that he can be discharged without returning the case to court.'

  'Judge Irwin is admitting him to bail,' Riordan said. 'Well, we'll get him out. I guess the boy'd like to go home.'

  Jesse Gearhart was looking at him; and Abner supposed that it was a moment to show his good will. He cast about in his mind for something to say; but a stubborn resistance of instinct frustrated him. He found himself shrugging. 'That's certainly all right as far as I'm concerned,' he said. 'Did you want to speak to me, Marty?'

  'Just about this,' Bunting said, getting up.

  Jesse, getting up, too, said, 'Ab, are you going to be busy after court?'

  'I don't think so,' Abner said.

  'Had something I wanted to talk to you about Could you come over to my place when you finish?'

  'Sure,' said Abner.

  It was useless for him to try to like the way Jesse put it. The request was natural, and naturally phrased; but since, for a dozen reasons, it could not be answered no, what was it but a command? Abner couldn't say: No, I haven't anything to see you about; and so he would go, obedient to a practical order; and stand, hat in hand, while Jesse instructed him. A man ought not to want anything in the world enough to do that. Abner reminded himself that there was only his own guess to make him think that Jesse planned to instruct him, to offer him anything, to sound him out about running for district attorney. 'Going to eat, Marty?' he said.

  It was embarrassment speaking; but Abner was able to realize that he had acted straight against any good, though half-hearted, intention he might have had to please Jesse. Jesse, if he wanted to be sensitive, too, must read into the short answer and the turning away to speak to Bunting an indifference or contempt that he would have the right to resent far more than anything Abner resented in Jesse.

  'Come on, come on,' Harry said. 'We have to be back here at one-fifteen. Want to eat, Mr. Clark?'

  'No, no. Never eat lunch,' John Clark said. Getting up, he went and extended himself on the leather couch, laying a handkerchief behind his head. He took the paper Bunting had discarded and set it like a tent over his face. 'Let's have a little quiet around here,' he said from under it.

  They went out the back door, beneath the stone arch of the passage to the jail. In the parking space under the trees, Judge Vredenburgh was just getting into his car, which Annette was driving. 'Ah,' said Harry, gazing after her. 'There's the little siren! Did you hear how Dick Nyce thought he was Ulysses? Dotty had to tie him to the mast.'

  They came down the diagonal walk and out of the shade to cross the blazing pavement of Court Street by the monument. Bill Ortt, his cap on the back of his head, his badge pinned to his sweat-soaked grey shirt whose sleeves were rolled as far as they would go up his tanned, tattooed arms, stood at the box from which the traffic lights were manually controlled. 'Hi, Mr. Bunting,' he said. He stopped the traffic two ways to let them go over.

  'Thank you, my good man!' said Harry. 'You know,' he said, 'in my subconscious mind, if any, that must be what I'm always hankering for. Traffic should halt when I appear; and then a breathless hush falls, broken perhaps by a few cries of "Wurts for President!''

  'Lifting his panama, Harry held it at an angle, and bowed right and left to the halted traffic. They reached the sidewalk in front of the Childerstown House and pushed through the shadowed screen doors.

  The dining-room was crowded; but the round table in the corner where they usually sat had somehow been saved for them. 'Want a drink?' said Harry. 'No. You two pillars of public temperance have to sneak your drinks. And not you, George. The district attorney's watching, so they can't serve minors. Well, I will drink alone, and be damned to you! Hello, Marie. Get me a dry martini; and some cold cuts.

  When they had ordered, Harry said, 'Ab, see the paper, that Times up there? Well, remember your friend Paul Bonbright at Cambridge? I happened to see a note in back in the business section. They just made him a partner. Frazier, Graham, and Rogers. Pretty nice, I'd say, at his age.'

  Abner heard Paul Bonbright's almost forgotten name with surprise. With surprise, too, he saw that Harry, reporting the item, looked disconsolate; as though he were thinking of his own prospects, compared with Paul Bonbright's; or of what a partner in a firm like that made, compared to what he made. Harry stared a moment, his face discontented, down the crowded dining-room.. He met the eye of someone he knew, nodded mechanically, and looked back.

  'Well, Paul can have it,' Abner said. 'How'd you like to be with Frazier, Graham, and Rogers, Marty?'

  'No,' said Bunting. 'Not on a bet. Life isn't long enough.'

  'Huh!' said Harry, 'a little bird, must have been a buzzard, told me that even you had simple aspirat
ions or ambitions, one of which might be about to be realized. So never mind that exalted tone.'

  'If you go around talking to birds,' Bunting said, 'you know what happens to you? They put you in the booby hatch.'

  'At least I wouldn't have any expenses there,' Harry said. 'But that twirp Bonbright! That's what gets you down! Right upon the scaffold, wrong upon the throne! Why —'

  Abner said, 'He was no twirp. I think he won the Ames Competition one year. I know he was on the Board of the Review —' Reminded of Paul Bonbright, Abner could recall him very well — a thin faced, long jawed boy with wiry black hair, of which he had already lost enough to make his high forehead higher. He and Abner had never been close friends; but they were cordial, casual acquaintances, borrowing cigarettes and books from each other. It was an acquaintanceship begun by accident, a throwing-together in sections and lecture seatings during the early days of first year, before the class sorted itself out. Bonbright was one of the people who brought Abner to realize, with dismay and some chagrin, that there are definite levels of intelligence, brains of differing strengths and capacities. The innocent supposition, entertained by most people, that even if they are not brilliant, they are not dumb, is correct only in a very relative sense.

  Abner had never been anything but modest about his own accomplishments. He knew that he didn't know much; and he had at least an inkling of how much there was to know. At Childerstown High School and at college he had never led his class nor taken prizes; but, without being aware that he did, he really blamed this on his failure to work hard, or any harder than he needed to. He knew that he was often inattentive, that he loafed a good deal, that at college he had been more interested in baseball and in the debating society than in his courses. What he did not know, what Paul Bonbright, among others, showed him, was that those abilities of his that got him, without distinction but also without much exertion, through all previous lessons and examinations, were not first-rate abilities handicapped by laziness, but second-rate, by no degree of effort or assiduity to be made the equal of abilities like Bonbright 's.

  The important truth was borne in on Abner, for he started with advantages that made him feel superior, able to help Bonbright. Many young men, confronted with the case system, have to admit that for their first term at least they literally do not understand anything. Abner had been born and bred in a family three generations old in the law. At home, spare rooms were lined with old reports and piled with back numbers of law journals. Engravings of Judge Story and Chancellor Kent hung in the hall. At table, the jargon of the courts, the law Latin, the principles of jurisprudence were ordinary conversation — what Father, sitting in Common Pleas, had been doing to-day. Abner knew the language. Of course, the assignments, the amount of stuff they expected him to read and memorize, staggered him; but he worked as hard as he could, harder than he ever had in his life, and he imagined that he was doing about as well as the rest of them. He found out that he was mistaken when Bonbright gradually stopped consulting Abner, the oracle, and began to correct and advise him; and then inevitably they saw less of each other, and Paul took up with his mental peers. Abner said to Harry, 'Is it Bonbright's fault that he has more brains than you have?'

  'Few if any people have more brains than I have,' Harry said. 'The Ames Competition! A petty triumph of grinds and pedants! Why, it seems to me you were in that one year. No, no; a Wurts would never sink so low.'

  'Well, I only sank low enough to come out last,' Abner said. 'They gave the Scott Club an old Bouvier for a booby prize. If you think the man who wins doesn't have to be good —'

  George Stacey had been attending closely. He said, 'I guess it must be pretty tough up there.' He was ready in his diffidence (untinctured, because they were older, not his rivals, with ill-feeling) to admit that his own degree was not quite in the same class.

  'Tough!' said Harry, now reminded that after all it was his school. 'Why, you come up there with an A.B. from some hick college and they eat you alive. You know what the first thing they say to you is?

  They say, "Gentlemen, look well at the man on your right and on your left, because next year one of you will not be here."'

  The classic exhortation was impressive, Abner must admit, when you first heard it. Harry might like it still; but Abner found that he himself definitely didn't. It rang with that unpleasant, really childish, cocky quality which went with the rigour and the exacting standards. It reminded you of certain professors, men of great learning and wisdom; but they none the less sought and enjoyed the poor and mean sport of traducing the stupid. Along with torts or contracts you learned in their lectures a lot of things like that; things you would have to unlearn afterward, or be the worse for all your life.

  Bunting, who had prepared for his bar examinations at night school, and in Judge Irwin's office, and who had often found that he knew as much as (and sometimes more than) graduates of the best universities, was listening with the look that answered all these pretensions. He was amused to see Harry (the more fatuously, because it was unconscious) pluming himself to George, not on what he knew, which would be absurd enough, but with an ultimate, almost indescribable absurdity, on where he had learned it. Watching Bunting's face, Abner was jolted to guess that Bunting in the dry and cool privacy of his own mind might very well consider him, Abner, touched with the same ridiculous presumption, ready with the same vauntings and vapourings; so dear to those who had them, so laughable to everyone else.

  Mat Rhea, picking his teeth thoughtfully, walked by, headed for the door. Over Harry's head, he said, 'Thick as thieves, you look. Who's doing who?' After him came Mr. Wells, who ran a jewellery and watch-repairing shop. 'Got that clock fixed for you, Marty,' he said. 'Any time you want it. Going to cost you a little. I had to replace a lot of bushings. It's a dandy, though. You could get your money out of it, any time you wanted to sell it.'

  'What's that?' said Abner.

  'Old clock I bought at an auction,' Bunting said. 'I like clocks. If I had some money, I'd collect them.'

  'Indeed?' said Harry Wurts, arising. 'Well, if you gentlemen will now excuse George and me, I have a certain stenographic transcript I wish to pick up —'

  'I wouldn't bother, if I were you,' Bunting said.

  'Of course you wouldn't,' Harry said, taking his check. 'The secret of my success is that I leave no stone unturned. Do you know what Fisher Ames said of Alexander Hamilton? I often think of it in connection with myself. He said: "It is rare that a man who owes so much to nature descends to depend on industry as if nature had done nothing for him. His habits of investigation were very remarkable; his mind seemed to cling to his subject until he had exhausted it —"'

  'Let it be a lesson to you. Come on, George.'

  When they were alone, while Bunting was swallowing the last of his coffee, Abner said, 'What's Jesse want to see me about?'

  Putting down his cup, Bunting said, 'You'll have to ask him.'

  'Don't you know?'

  'I might have thought I knew last week,' Bunting said. 'But for all I know now, he may be going to tell you where to head in.'

  'And for all he knows,' Abner said, 'that may be what I'm going to tell him.'

  'That's right,' Bunting said. 'I've said my say, Ab. Maybe, like Harry, you think all this is beneath you and you ought to be in New York at Frazier, Graham, and Rogers, or somewhere, getting your twenty-five thousand and your stomach ulcers. I thought you had better sense.'

  He pushed back his chair, lit a cigarette, and, bending forward, put both elbows on the table. 'We didn't mean to tell everyone, because it upsets things; but it seems to be getting out anyway, and you certainly have a right to know, if you care. I'm going into the Attorney General's office in the fall. It's some special trial work I'd like to do. If you want my job here, I'd like you to have it, because you're the best man for the job. You know the ropes now, and you could handle it. Both Judge Irwin and Judge Vredenburgh would like to have you. I always thought it was what you wanted; but I may be
wrong. You know about that.'

  Bunting narrowed his eyes and looked at the smoke rising from his cigarette. 'I've done what I could for you, naturally. I've been making you do all I could in this trial, because I wanted it to be as much your work as mine, getting these birds convicted.' He shrugged. 'I thought your idea was — I mean, that you had it pretty well settled in your mind that you'd go on being a hick lawyer, if Harry wants to call it that. I mean, marry and settle down, and maybe in the end get a judgeship — they seem to run in your family. I don't say it amounts to a lot. You won't get rich and you won't get famous; but you have a good life; one that's some use, and makes some sense.'

  'I agree,' Abner said.

  'Well, I wonder if you do,' Bunting said. 'Maybe you just think you do. Look at Harry! That business about your friend was eating him up —'

  'Look, Marty,' Abner said, 'I don't know about Harry, but I know about me. I haven't any use for that kind of a job, and I doubt if it would have any use for me. I'm not good enough. I don't know enough law —'

  Bunting said, 'I was in a big office for a couple of years after I was admitted to the bar. You know, twelve dollars a week, while you're learning the flourishes. It really isn't law at all. It has nothing to do with justice or equity. What it really is, is the theory and practice of fraud, of finding ways to outsmart people who're trying to outsmart you. Sure, it takes brains! Sure; they'll pay you anything if you can do it for them. But you only have one life.'

  'I know that,' Abner said. Bunting was not much given to speeches; and to hear him making one, and making it so earnestly, not only surprised Abner, but, by the concern or regard it showed, touched him. 'And thanks, Marty. I see your point, and I'm going to bear it in mind.'

  'Bearing it in mind doesn't do any good,' Bunting said. 'You ought to get yourself organized. Why don't you get married?'

  'Well,' said Abner, 'anyway, I don't see the connection. And if you don't mind my saying so, I don't think I could do it, just on someone else's advice.'

  'All the same, and I know it's none of my business, there is a connection.'