Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  The accuser also wore black, but her fashionableness, as compared with that of the defendant, was as the fashionableness of Boston to that of New York; she had studied a subdued elegance, and she wore a crape veil instead of flowers on her hat. She was of a sort of dusky pallor, and her features had not the Congoish fulness nor her skin the brilliancy of the defendant’s. Her taste in kid gloves was a decorous black.

  She testified that she was employed as second-girl in a respectable family, and that the day before she had received a visit at the door from the defendant, who had invited her to come down the street to a certain point and be beaten within an inch of her life. On her failure to appear, the defendant came again, and notified her that she should hold the beating in store for her and bestow it whenever she caught her out-of-doors. These visits and threats had terrified the plaintiff, and annoyed the respectable family with which she lived, and she had invoked the law.

  During the delivery of her complaint, the defendant had been lifting and lowering herself by the bar at which she stood, in anticipation of the judge’s permission to question the plaintiff. At a nod from him she now flung herself half across it.

  “What’d I say I’d whip you for?”

  The Plaintiff, thoughtfully: “What’d you say you’d whip me for?”

  The Defendant, beating the railing with her hand: “Yes, that’s what I ast you: what for?”

  The Plaintiff, with dignity: “I don’t know as you told me what for.”

  The Defendant: “Now, now, none o’ that! You just answer my question.”

  The Judge: “She has answered it.”

  The Defendant, after a moment of surprise: “Well, then, I’ll ast her another question. Didn’t I tell you if I ever caught you goin’ to a ball with my husband ag’in I’d—”

  The Plaintiff: “I didn’t go to no ball with your husband!”

  The Defendant: “You didn’t go with him! Ah—” The Plaintiff: “I went with the crowd. I didn’t know who I went with.”

  The Defendant: “Well, I know who paid fifty cents for your ticket! Why don’t he give me any of his money? Hain’t spent fifty cents on me or his child, there, since it was born. An’ he goes with you all the time — to church and everywhere.”

  The Judge: “That will do.”

  The plaintiff, who had listened “with sick and scornful looks averse,” stepped from the stand, and a dusky gentlewoman, as she looked, took her place, and corroborated her testimony. She also wore genteel black, and she haughtily turned from the defendant’s splendors as she answered much the same questions that the latter had put to the plaintiff. She used her with the disdain that a lady who takes care of bank parlors may show to a social inferior with whom her grandson has been trapped into a distasteful marriage, and she expressed by a certain lift of the chin and a fall of the eyelids the absence of all quality in her granddaughter-in-law as no words could have done it. I suppose it will be long before these poor creatures will cease to seem as if they were playing at our social conditions, or the prejudices and passions when painted black will seem otherwise than funny. But if this old lady had been born a duchess, or the daughter of a merchant one remove from retail trade, she could not have represented the unrelenting dowager more vividly. She bore witness to the blameless character of the plaintiff, to whom her grandson had paid only those attentions permissible from a gentleman unhappy in his marriage and living apart from his wife — a wife, she insinuated, unworthy both before and since the union which she had used sinister arts in forming with a family every way above her. She did not overdo the part, and she descended from the stand with the same hauteur toward the old man who succeeded her as she had shown his daughter.

  The hapless sire — for this was the character he attempted — came upon the stand with his forsaken grandchild in his arms, and bore his testimony to the fact that his daughter was a good girl, and had always done what was right, and had been brought up to it. He dwelt upon her fidelity to her virtuous family training, with no apparent sense of incongruity in the facts — elicited by counsel — to the contrary; and he was an old man whose perceptions were somewhat blunted as to other things. He maundered on about his son-in-law’s neglect of his wife and child, and the expense which he had been put to on their account, and especially about the wrongs his family had suffered since his son-in-law “got to going” with the plaintiff.

  “You say,” interpreted the judge, “that the plaintiff tried to seduce the affections of your daughter’s husband from her?”

  The old man was brought to a long and thoughtful pause, from which he was startled by a repetition of the judge’s question. “I — I don’ know as I understand you, judge,” he faltered.

  “Do you mean that the plaintiff — the person whom your daughter threatened to beat — has been trying to get your daughter’s husband’s affections away from her?”

  “Why, he hain’t never showed her no affections, judge! He’s just left me to support her.”

  “Very well, then. Has the plaintiff tried to get your daughter’s husband away from her?”

  “I guess not, judge. He hain’t never took any notice of my daughter since he married her.”

  “Well, does your son-in-law go with this person?”

  “With who, judge?”

  “With the plaintiff.”

  “De of woman? Ho, he don’ go wid de ol’ woman any: she’s his grandmother.”

  “Well, does he go with the young woman?”

  “Oh yes! Yes! He goes with the young woman. Goes with her all the time. That’s the one he goes with!”

  He seemed to be greatly surprised and delighted to find that this point was what the judge had been trying to get at, and the audience shared his pleasure.

  I really forget how the case was decided. Perhaps my train, which I began to be anxious not to lose, hurried me away before the denouement, as often happens with the suburban play-goer. But to one who cares rather for character than for plot it made little difference. I came away thinking that if the actors in the little drama were of another complexion, how finely the situation would have served in a certain sort of intense novel; the patrician dowager, inappeasably offended by the low match her grandson has made, and willing to encourage his penchant for the lady of his own rank, whom some fortuity may yet enable him to marry; the wife, with her vulgar but strong passions, stung to madness by the neglect and disdain of her husband’s family — it is certainly a very pretty intrigue, and I commend it to my brother (or sister) novelists who like to be praised by the reviewers for what the reviewers think profundity and power.

  VIII

  It was nearly a year later that I paid my second visit to the police court, on a day, like the first, humid and dull, but very close and suffocatingly hot. It was a Monday morning, and there was a full dock, as I have learned that the prisoner’s pen at the right of the clerk’s desk is called. The clerk was standing with that sheaf of indictments in his hand, and saying, “John O’Brien!” and John O’Brien was answering, “Here, sor!” and the clerk was proceeding, “Complained of for being drunk guilty or not guilty pay a fine of one dollar and costs stand committed to the House of Industry,” and then writing on the indictment and tossing it aside. As I modestly took my stand at the door, till I should gather courage to cross the room to one of the vacant seats which I saw among the policemen, one of these officers of the court approached me and said, “No room for you here to-day, my friend. Go up on the Common.” In spite of my share of that purely American vanity which delights in official recognition, I could not be flattered at this, and it was with relief that I found he was addressing a fellow-habitue behind me. The court-room was, in fact, very full, and there were no seats on the benches ordinarily allotted to spectators; so I at once crossed to my place, and sat down among the policemen, to whom I authorized my intrusion by taking my notebook from my pocket. I have some hopes that the spectators thought me a detective in plain clothes, and revered me accordingly. There was such a perso
n near me, with his club sticking out of his back-pocket, whom I am sure I revered.

  I had not come to report the events of this session of the court, but to refresh the impressions of my first visit, and I was glad to find them so just. There was, of course, some little change; but the same magistrate was there, serene, patient, mercifully inclined of visage; the colored attorney was there, in charge, as before, of a disastrous Irish case. The officials who tried to keep order had put off their flannel coats for coats of seersucker, and each carried a Japanese fan; neither wore a collar, now, and I fancied them both a little more in flesh. I think they were even less successful than formerly in quelling disturbances, though they were even more polished in the terms of their appeal. “Too much conversation in the court!” they called out to us collectively. “Conversation must cease,” they added. Then one, walking up to a benchful of voluble witnesses, would say, “‘Must cease that conversation,” and to my fellow-policemen, “Less conversation, gentlemen”; then again to the room at large, “Stop all conversation in the court,” and “All conversation must cease entirely.”

  The Irish case, which presently came on, was a question of assault and battery between Mrs. O’Hara and Mrs. MacMannis; it had finally to be dismissed, after much testimony to the guilt and peaceable character of both parties. A dozen or more witnesses were called, principally young girls, who had come in their best, and with whom one could fancy this an occasion of present satisfying excitement and future celebrity. The witnesses were generally more interesting than the parties to the suits, I thought, and I could not get tired of my fellow-spectators, I suppose, if I went a great many times. I liked to consider the hungry gravity of their countenances, as they listened to the facts elicited, and to speculate as to the ultimate effect upon their moral natures — or their immoral natures — of the gross and palpable shocks daily imparted to them by the details of vice and crime. I have tried to treat my material lightly and entertainingly, as a true reporter should, but I would not have my reader suppose that I did not feel the essential cruelty of an exhibition that tore its poor rags from all that squalid shame, and its mask from all that lying, cowering guilt, or did not suspect how it must harden and deprave those whom it daily entertained. As I dwelt upon the dull visages of the spectators, certain spectacles vaguely related themselves to what I saw: the women who sat and knitted at the sessions of the Revolutionary tribunals of Paris and overwhelmed with their clamor the judges’ feeble impulses to mercy; the roaring populace at the Spanish bull-fight and the Roman arena. Here the same elements were held in absolute silence — debarred even from “conversation” — hut it was impossible not to feel that here in degree were the conditions that trained men to demand blood, to rave for the guillotine, to turn down the thumb. This procession of misdeeds, passing under their eyes day after day, must leave a miasm of moral death behind it which no prison or workhouse can hereafter cure. We all know that the genius of our law is publicity; but it may be questioned whether criminal trials may not be as profitably kept private as hangings, the popular attendance on which was once supposed to be a bulwark of religion and morality.

  IX

  Not that there was any avoidable brutality, or even indecorum, in the conduct of the trials that I saw. A spade was necessarily called a spade; but it seemed to me that with all the lapse of time and foreign alloy the old Puritan seriousness was making itself felt even here, and subduing the tone of the procedure to a grave decency consonant with the inquiries of justice. For it was really justice that was administered, so far as I could see; and justice that was by no means blind, but very open-eyed and keen-sighted. The causes were decided by one man, from evidence usually extracted out of writhing reluctance or abysmal stupidity, and the judgment must be formed and the sentence given where the magistrate sat, amid the confusion of the crowded room. Yet, except in the case of my poor thief, I did not see him hesitate; and I did not doubt his wisdom even in that case. His decisions seemed to me the result of most patient and wonderfully rapid cogitation, and in dealing with the witnesses he never lost his temper amid densities of dulness which it is quite impossible to do more than indicate. If it were necessary, for example, to establish the fact that a handkerchief was white, it was not to be done without some such colloquy as this:

  “Was it a white handkerchief?”

  “Sor?”

  “Was the handkerchief white?”

  “Was it white, sor?”

  “Yes, was it white?”

  “Was what white, sor?”

  “The handkerchief — was the handkerchief white?”

  “What handkerchief, sor?”

  “The handkerchief you just mentioned — the handkerchief that the defendant dropped.”

  “I didn’t see it, sor.”

  “Didn’t see the handkerchief?”

  “Didn’t see him drop it, sor,”

  “Well, did you see the handkerchief?”

  “The handkerchief, sor? Oh yes, sor! I saw it — I saw the handkerchief “Well, was it while?”

  It was, sor.”

  A boy who complained of another for assaulting him said that he knocked him down. “How did he knock you down?” asked the judge. “Did he knock you down with his fist or his open hand?”

  “Yes, sor.”

  “Which did he do it with?”

  “Put his arms round me and knocked me down.”

  “Then he didn’t knock you down. He threw you down.”

  “Yes, Sor. He didn’t t’row me down. Put his arms round me and knocked me down.”

  It would he impossible to caricature these things, or to exaggerate the charitable long-suffering that dealt with such cases. Sometimes, as if in mere despair, the judge called the parties to him and questioned them privately; after which the case seemed to be settled without further trial.

  X

  I have spoken of the theatrical illusion which the proceedings of the court produced; but it often seemed to me also like a school where bad boys and girls were brought up for punishment. They were, indeed, like children, those poor offenders, and had a sort of innocent simplicity in their wickedness, as good people have in their goodness. One case came up on the occasion of my last visit, which I should like to report verbatim in illustration, but it was of too lurid a sort to be treated by native realism; we can only bear that sort when imported; and undoubtedly there is something still to be said in behalf of decency, at least in the English language. I can only hint that this case was one which in some form or other has been coming up in the police courts ever since police courts began. It must have been familiar to those of Thebes three thousand years ago, and will be so in those of cities which shall look back on Boston in an antiquity as hoary. A hard-working old fool with a month’s pay in his pocket and the lost soul with whom he carouses; the theft; the quarrel between the lost soul and the yet more fallen spirit who harbored her and traded at second-hand in her perdition as to who stole the fool’s money, — what stale materials! Yet I was as much interested as if this were the first case of the kind, and, confronted with the fool and the lost soul and the yet more fallen spirit, I could not feel that they were — let me say it in all seriousness and reverence — so very bad. Perhaps it was because they stood there reduced to the very nakedness of their shame, and confessedly guilty in what human nature struggles to the last to deny — stood there, as a premise, far past the hope of lying — that they seemed rather subjects for pity than abhorrence. The fool and the lost soul were light and trivial; they even laughed at some of the grosser facts; but that yet more fallen spirit was ghastly tragical, as bit by bit the confession of her business was torn from her; it was torture that seemed hideously out of proportion to any end to be attained; yet as things are it had to be. If then and there some sort of redemption might have begun!

  The divine life which is in these poor creatures, as in the best and purest, seemed to be struggling back to some relation and likeness to our average sinful humanity, insisting that if socially
and publicly we denied it we should not hold it wholly outcast in our secret hearts, nor refuse it our sympathy. Seeing that on their hopelessly sunken level their common humanity kept that symmetry and proportion which physical deformity shows, one could not doubt that a distorted kindliness and good-nature remained to them in the midst of their depravity: the man was like a grayheaded, foolish boy; the two women as simple and cunning as two naughty children. It could be imagined that they had their friendly moments; that in extremity they might care for each other; that even such a life as theirs had its reliefs from perdition, as in disease there is relief from pain, and no suffering, out of romance, is incessant. They had certainly their decorums, their criterions. On their plane, everything but the theft and the noisy quarrel was of custom and for granted; but these were misdemeanors and disgraceful. Like another hostess of the sort, the fallen spirit was aggrieved at these. “Do you think I keep thieves in my house?... The tithe of a hair was never lost in my house before.... I’ll no swaggerers.... There comes no swaggering here.... I will bar no honest man my house, nor no cheater; but I do not love swaggering.” This is the sum of what she said that she had said in rebuke of the lost soul; that thieving and that swaggering, they incensed her, and roused in her all the instincts of a moral and respectable person. Humanity adjusts itself to all conditions, and doubtless God forsakes it in none, but still shapes it to some semblance of health in its sickness, of order in its disorder, of righteousness in its sin.