The Just And The Unjust Read online

  The barge parties left at six o'clock. It was ten minutes past six when Bunting finished with Mr. Foulke; and Abner went home then to change his clothes. They had arranged that Abner would drive by and pick Bunting up in half an hour. The Buntings lived in one of the new houses out near the golf course on the extension of the hill on which Childerstown was mostly built. From the road in front there was a good view of the lower country and the course of the canal, much of it tree-lined, bending away east through the fields and woods to the gathering horizon haze. The effect was spacious; a burst of calm and pleasant landscape filled with the evening sun, the summer foliage full but still fresh, the fields in a pattern of blocks of different greens. Through gaps in the trees the narrow water of the canal could be seen; and, studying it carefully, Abner was able at last to catch a glimpse of the barge hardly moving, a mile or two away. He pointed it out to Bunting. 'We can pick it up at Waltons,' he said.

  Bunting called to the maid, 'All right, Pauline!'

  Hearing him, his two little girls came running down the lawn from where they had been playing croquet. 'Daddy, could we —'

  'Nope!' said Bunting.

  Abner said, 'Hello, Jenny. Hello, Sarah.'

  They said, 'Hello, Mr. Coates. Daddy —'

  'No, sir!' said Bunting. 'Not on your life! I have to go. Mother's going to be plenty mad, already.' He got into the car while they climbed on the gate, their serious faces and dark heads swaying above the white pickets. 'Good-bye, Daddy! Good-bye, Mr. Coates!' they yelled.

  Abner let his clutch in and slid away down the hill. In court, or in the office, it was hard to think of Marty playing with children, or of children being so attached to him — or, for that matter, of Marty bowing meekly to Muriel Bunting's efficient and sensible direction of his household, his children, and himself. The children looked like Muriel, a handsome dark girl, a little taller than Marty. She had sharp ironic ways of checking and correcting Marty; of complaining about the hours he was often obliged to keep; even, of jeering gently at his position and powers. While she did it, she gazed at her husband with an intent, intense devotion that made nonsense of everything she had just said of his unreasonableness or his other failings. Like his daughters, Muriel was, in a word, crazy about him. Thinking of the simple pleasant house, the devoted wife, the agreeable children, Abner said, 'Nice kids. You must have lots of fun with them.'

  Bunting said, 'They have their moments. And then they have their other moments. You know, I've been thinking about Earl Foulke. It's definitely second childhood. He can't keep anything in his head. That Williams thing is just an example. Did I tell you, it was last month, I guess, he issued another one of his suspicious character warrants? He's been told half a dozen times there's no such offence! Why do you think they go on electing him?'

  'They think this a free country,' Abner said, not quite easy. 'Nobody in Childerstown is going to tell them their business. He's been good enough for Kingstown Township for twenty years; and so he's good enough for us.'

  'Well, sooner or later,' Bunting said, 'he's going to do something we can get him for — I don't mean prosecute him, though he's as likely as not to do something he could be prosecuted for, but something we could use to make him resign.'

  Abner said, 'I don't know how much harm he does down there. I sort of feel sorry for him.'

  'I feel sorry for him myself,' Bunting said, 'but that isn't the point. It's not fair to the people who come before him. There are lots of them, and there's only one of him — thank God! It isn't right to let him off.'

  'Speaking of that,' Abner said, 'did John Costigan tell you that he thought he was going to get some evidence this week to show that McCook has been buying junk from minors again? There's a man that never should have been let off.'

  'Been Vredenburgh, he never would have been let off. If it comes up again, we'll try and see if we can't make sure Vredenburgh hears it. Judge Irwin's trouble is, he always thinks maybe the defendant didn't really mean to do what he did.'

  'Unless it has liquor in it,' Abner said.

  'I'm not even sure of that any more,' Bunting said. 'You didn't hear that Eustis non-support case. I guess you were upstairs. Eustis admitted what the trouble was — he'd go on these bats and spend all his money, or at least forget to make the weekly payments for his wife to Bill's office. Irwin said, "Well, if that's the only reason — " and I would have bet Eustis was going right to jail; but Irwin goes on, "it is plain that a simple change in your habits will enable you to make your remittances to the probation officer regularly. Now, we can't close all the saloons; and the saloons can't, or won't, stop you at the door, or refuse to sell you a drink. And then one drink leads to another. You know that." Irwin looks at him and smiles and says, "Now I know of a system that works very well if you care to apply it. I've seen it work successfully for more than sixty years because I use it myself. I make sure that I will not take that second drink, or those successive drinks, by not taking the first drink; and I make sure that I will not take the first drink by walking right on by every saloon I see. You might like to try that." So Eustis is out on his own recognizance. Only thing is, in about three months or less he'll be in again.'

  Abner said, 'Irwin's a good man.'

  'I don't think anyone would ever argue with you about that,' Bunting said, 'and he knows more law than anybody in the county, except maybe your father. But he shouldn't have let Eustis off. I was afraid for a while he was going to sit in this Zollicoffer case. I know Harry was praying that he would. I think we have that pretty well in hand. Mrs. Z. wasn't too bad; and I think Leming is going to be all right. Doctor Janvier says he's much better. You never know what will happen when these dopers lay off. The jury won't like him because of his turning state's evidence; but they don't like Basso standing mute, either. Probably about cancels out —' He fell silent, absorbed and reflective.

  Warm air sang by. The new grey concrete road rolled smoothly in long gradients, bent gently right and left between its cable-strung fences. At the white church and stone store at Waltons Corners, Abner put out a hand and swept into the dirt lane that went down through an orchard of rotting apple trees to cross the canal. He parked the car below the old fan-trussed bridge, and they got out.

  The barge was approaching on a mile-long straightaway of tranquil water. Between the low green banks, beneath the green arch of overhanging trees, it moved at a snail's pace, fanning out slow smooth ripples from its bow. Hoots and cheers came from it to show that Bunting and Abner had been observed. Ben Wister cried to his mules and aimlessly cracked his whip. On board somebody had a portable radio, and the beat of music grew louder, approaching. Thickets of underbrush shadowed most of the canal, but level sun here and there broke across the tow path. Suddenly the mules would amble into shafts of splendour. Immaculate and glowing, the barge's new paint lit up; on deck, the dazzling gold light gilded women's dresses and men's white flannels. Waiting where the tow path, revetted with stone, passed under the hump of the little bridge, Abner could hear ice clatter in a cocktail shaker; and, regardless of the radio, Harry Wurts' unmistakable voice, loudly lifted, singing: 'I wish I was single! Oh, then, oh, then...'

  The mules came up, ducking their stubborn heads, twitching their big ears. Bunting said, 'Hello, Ben. Don't you get tired walking?'

  Ben winked. 'Slipped me a little that snakes' milk they got there. Some of that, and you can walk to China.'

  The long tow line went by, the barge drew abreast. Mark Irwin, who had evidently been at the snakes' milk, too, said, 'Stand by to repel boarders, men!'

  Muriel Bunting called out, 'Marty, where on earth have you been? Honestly, you might have —'

  Abner stepped on to the moving deck. He nodded to Doctor Mosher, who said, 'Want to speak to you later, Ab.' Abner made his way through the crowd along the board table where hampers were being unpacked and supper laid out. Harry Wurts, filling cocktail glasses from a huge silver shaker with two crossed calumets on it, said, 'I admit the law, but deny its app
licability to the case in hand. Wake up, Bonnie! Here's the boy friend.'

  Abner took the glass held out to him and looked at Bonnie and laughed. She had both hands full of knives and forks. Pushing him gently with her elbow, she said, 'Get out of my way. I have to —'

  'Let them grab their own,' Abner said. He took a swallow of the mixed whisky and vermouth. Bonnie pushed on by him. 'Hello,' she said. 'Don't you get tight.'

  'The thing I like about her,' said Harry, 'is that she looks so damn Scotch —Oh, wad,' he said, with dramatic expression, 'some power the giftie gie us —' He laughed and laughed, pouring himself another drink.

  Abner was obliged to laugh, too; for though he wished that a way could be found to make Harry mind his own business, Abner knew what Harry meant. Bonnie was well-made, but long in the leg, with narrow hips and square thin shoulders. Her hair was a light curly brown. The shape of her face was delicate, thin-skinned, with a fresh but faint colouring; yet it was the same shape that, seen in a man with a man's coarse complexion and heavier features, is generally called raw-boned — the wide forehead; the spaced brown eyes; the outstanding cheekbones and the cheeks sloping to the straight jaw and neat, expressive but controlled mouth. It was attractive rather than pretty. More noticeable than the features was her candid mien, her spirited carriage of the head, her air of knowing her own mind. The resulting expression was an odd, and to Abner, appealing blend of the lightheadedness that came from physical well-being with the sobriety that came from her thoughts, which must have been anxious during most of her twenty-five years.

  Abner knew a good deal about it. He and Bonnie were relatives in one of those involved patterns of consanguinity that have no actual meaning and could hardly have been kept straight except in a small town. Her mother, Mary Coates, was Cousin Mary to Abner's father; but she was actually the Judge's great-grand-uncle's son's daughter; which meant, as nearly as Abner could figure it out, that Bonnie and he had a great-great-grandfather in common, and so were either third or fourth (he was never quite sure which) cousins. Mary Coates was, however, a closer connection of the Judge's by affinity than by blood. Her mother's sister was the wife of Judge Coates' Uncle Nate, who thus became also Cousin Mary's Uncle Nate. Furthermore, Mary had married Robert Drummond, for years Philander Coates' most intimate friend. There were thus three grounds on which Cousin Mary's affairs concerned the Judge.

  When Mary and Robert Drummond had been married nine or ten years — the summer that Bonnie—(she had been christened Janet, but nobody who knew her ever called her that) was seven — a grotesque and unforeseeable accident occurred. It was the sort of thing that often gets a paragraph in the papers, but for practical purposes may be said never to happen. Robert Drummond, recently making a good deal of money out of the Childerstown Building & Loan Society, decided to buy a farm on which he thought he would breed Aberdeen Angus cattle. Late one July afternoon he went out to the farm he had bought to look at the work in progress. While he stood talking to the builder in the uncompleted barn, a thunderstorm came up. He had left the windows open in his car, and seeing what was coming, he ran to close them. It had not yet begun to rain, so Robert Drummond turned to walk back to shelter. The builder, half blinded by the flash, saw him struck down in the barnyard and instantly killed by a lightning bolt.

  Though it would be hard to devise a better way to die, everyone found it appalling. The loss had not been made easier by those thoughts, consolation of long preparatory illness, or senile decline, that all was for the best, that the dead now suffered no more, that a term was put to the uncertainty and expense of the living.

  Judge Coates was very much upset. He regarded Cousin Mary with the tenderest sympathy. He felt deep compassion for a woman, still young, who had lost so suddenly and tragically one of the finest men who ever lived. He knew that she suffered a grief time could not cure. She must never be expected to take much further interest in life; and Judge Coates, though he did all he could to cheer her, and even reminded her of what she owed her child, never seriously expected her to get over it, and could not blame her if she wished that she were dead, too. Therefore it was a great surprise to Judge Coates when, about two years later, Cousin Mary told him, saying that she wanted him to be the first to know, that she had gone to a town in the next state with Jared Wacker and married him.

  It was not in itself an objectionable match. The Wackers were good Childerstown people, as good as the Coateses. Moreover, Jared was a lawyer, which, in a legal family, was a point in his favour. It was true that Jared was not popular with the rest of the bar; but sometimes this could be expected when a man won, as Jared did, most of his cases. It might or might not be true that Jared was sarcastic, secretive, oversmart, and disobliging to his colleagues. It was certainly true that for one reason or another plenty of local lawyers would say that, if you wanted their private opinion, they didn't trust Wacker any farther than they could throw the jail.

  Here was reasonable doubt; and Judge Coates had little personal knowledge of Jared. Before Jared was admitted to the bar, Judge Coates had gone to the Superior Court, and so he lacked the basis of appraisal he got, or thought he got, from hearing a man plead. He gave Jared the benefit of that particular doubt. Judge Coates never listened to such talk until something tangible was brought before the Bar Association. Judge Coates objected to the match on other grounds. An injury had been done to his idea of the fitness of things by Cousin Mary's unaccountable resumption of interest in mundane, and even (the idea was highly distasteful, but elopement hinted impatience, a posting with-dexterity) in carnal matters. This he could not mention; but another thing Judge Coates didn't like was the difference in the newly-weds' ages. Jared Wacker was five or six years younger than Mary. Judge Coates wondered — in fact, he wondered out loud, and to Mary — just how anxious Jared would have been to marry a woman older than himself, a widow with a daughter almost ten years old, if she hadn't been, at least by Childerstown standards, very well-off.

  After that Mary did not speak to Cousin Philander for three years. In the course of them she became, with a dispatch many people thought indelicate, the mother of a son, and then of twins. Though nobody knew it, nor even (for Jared's business seemed good) thought of suspecting it, Jared had been applying himself to her fortune with similar dispatch. That came out when, in a scandal unexampled locally, Jared Wacker walked one morning across the courthouse square to his office and was never seen again. He took along whatever remained of his wife's money, and several trust funds to which he had access. Presumably he also took along his stenographer, a girl of bad reputation; for she, too, was seen no more.

  Judge Coates forced Mary to abandon the not-speaking nonsense and devoted his considerable influence and experience to having Jared tracked down. While this went on, and it went on several years without the least success before the Judge was willing to drop it, Mary and Bonnie, and Jared junior, and the six months old twins, Philip and Harold, lived at the Judge's. That was before Abner's mother died; and there was increasing friction. It finally reached such a point that Mary, in the heat of a quarrel with her hostess, blamed Cousin Philander for the loss of her money, or at least, for the failure to recover it. The row, though about the Judge, was strictly between Mary and Mrs. Coates. Abner, away at college at the time, was told very little of what happened. Perhaps Cousin Mary had not been entirely to blame, for Mrs. Coates was a sick woman and died before the next spring.

  Moved, no doubt genuinely, by this sad circumstance, Cousin Mary faced about again. She took to herself all the blame. She was filled with despair to think of her inexcusable conduct towards Edith Coates, whom she had always loved, and who had done everything for her. She did not know what to say to Cousin Philander, who had also done everything for her; and this was no more than the truth. When his wife ordered Cousin Mary out of her house, the Judge necessarily arranged for another house for them to go to, and since Cousin Mary had none of her own, he provided her with money. This he continued to do; and later he also sup
plied the money for Bonnie to take a secretarial course, so that she could get a job; and then, by speaking to appropriate people, got Bonnie a job as secretary to the principal of the high school.

  Abner could see Cousin Mary busily unpacking hampers. Cousin Mary sometimes said that what she had been through was more than mortal woman could bear; but the truth was, she looked considerably less than her fifty years, and her manner, at least in public, was unsubdued, almost gay. A person who knew her history met her for the first time with surprise and admiration. Most people did admire her; and, in a way, Abner admired her, too; but with a good many reservations. Her gaiety, her habit of not troubling about her troubles, was all right up to a point. After that it was better described as wilful and exasperating irresponsibility. The job of managing her affairs was not easy, and when she had done as much as she felt like doing, Cousin Mary lay down on it with a shrug. She implied that the whole business bored her; and, anyway, she was above niggling economies and petty calculations. You got the impression that she was improvident on purpose and careless by design because she liked the air of pretty negligence she thought it gave her. Abner had sometimes wanted to ask her why, when she didn't care herself, anyone else should be expected to care. He had sometimes wanted to ask how she had the cheek to expect Bonnie to spend her life supporting her mother and Jared Wacker's children.

  Abner stood aside, still watching Cousin Mary, while people, mostly men, came up to get a drink. Mr. Schaeffer, the Burgess, said to him, 'Quite a case, Ab. What do you think about those fellows?'

  Abner said, 'Personally, I think they ought to be convicted.' He found himself awkward; not because of Mr. Schaeffer, who was a harmless and agreeable old man; but because, behind Mr. Schaeffer, was Jesse Gearhart. Jesse would not be coming up to get a drink, for Jesse did not drink; so he was probably coming to speak to Abner.