Chapter 47

Cass Timberlane was pretending that he was a judge, sitting on the bench in a murder case. What he was really doing was sitting on the bench in a murder case.

The audible case was that of a construction-gang laborer who was alleged to have killed his foreman with a pickaxe, after an argument about Finland and Russia. Sweeney Fishberg, for the defense, showed that there was a question which of the gang had done it, and somehow suggested that it had been a good idea anyway. He had smuggled into the case a confusing dispute as to which of the suspects had worn a mustache at the time of the killing, and for hours there had been the dreary and inexpert testimony of barbers, neighbors, and people who happened to have taken snapshots at that time—at about that time—somewhere near that time—they thought.

Judge Timberlane was attentive enough, but his mind constantly slid off to a second trial that was dearer to him and more agonizing. In this inaudible and imaginary trial, he was the defendant, charged with having killed Bradd Criley.

—Oh, quit your childish day-dreaming! You know that you’re too civilized, or too flabby, even to beat him up—as you once boasted to Jinny that you could, you shanty chevalier!

—You don’t particularly WANT to kill him. “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord: I will repay.” But you haven’t even a good healthy desire for vengeance, the Lord’s or anybody else’s. You don’t see Bradd as an enemy, but as a worm, a crawler into decent men’s honest bread.

Suddenly the criminal in the imaginary trial was not himself but Bradd, and he, as judge, was in a splendid, romantic position. Awkward obstacles like codes and juries were cleared away. Bradd trembled (though he had never yet seen Bradd tremble) before the Judge, the very Judge whose lovely young wife he had stolen. He was charged with rape, embezzlement, high treason. The Judge was shining and mighty as an ancient Israelite law-giver upon his throne, and righteousness glowed upon a face dark with honorable wrath.

But his nobility triumphed, and he thundered, “Accused, while I could send you to prison for all your shameful years, I hold the law above my private wrong.”

—Rats!

—Of course practically, the way I could get even with Bradd would be to let the Wargates know what sort of a crook their legal representative is. Pull him down, as for years I’ve helped to raise him up.

—-Yes? Now can you imagine what a decent fellow like Webb would say if you came around tattling about one of his staff?

—Well, I didn’t seriously mean I’d do it.

—You better NOT seriously-mean-it!

Cass would have said that he had small “imagination,” but he did have his projections of thought.

What would the ruthless and fickle Bradd do to his girl? Would he live on with her, but so neglect and mock her that she would escape into boozing or scarred cynicism? Would he kick her out, and in that humiliation would she lose every pride and eagerness?

Cass did not at all think that her adultery was a prank to be smiled over. He was raw with the affront. Yet he insisted that there had never been in her any malice, any delight in hurting him. She was fundamentally good, as the pleasant Bradd was fundamentally evil.

Or so he meditated.

The minute Comedy of the Murderer’s Mustache, on which hung the life-imprisonment of a human being and the future of his family, plodded on. Vincent Osprey, associated with Fishberg in the defense, was making notes, then plucking at Fishberg’s sleeve and whispering into his irritated ear. The master of the court, watching Osprey, reflected:

—I can tell he’s been having a row with that grasping wife of his again. He’s so nervous and helpful.

Anyway, he would never write to her the long letter which he had instantaneously planned while stooping to drink from the fountain in the court-house corridor that morning: a nasty little piece of literary goods about her new associates in the East being libertines. As he listened to the pounding of the legal machinery, his spite seemed as trivial as it would be useless. This tragedy of his loss was as far beyond his control as this trial was beyond control of the prisoner, and it had less sense and pattern.

Cass’s defeat, he believed, came neither from the intentional malice of men nor from the conscious irony of the gods. It merely happened, like a storm, from causes that could be traced clearly enough but still did not make sense. Human beings, who could crush the atom and talk round the world, still could make no more illuminating comment upon the collapse of solid-seeming love than the ancient wailing, “Why—why—why?”

The session closed for the night. In his chambers, Cass wearily took off his silk robe and handed it to George Hame.

“Sweeney doing a fine job,” yawned George. “If he had a single bit of evidence on his side, he’d get that Hunky off.”

“Believe the fellow’s guilty, George?”

“Guilty? Of course he is.”

The Judge was thinking of his wife’s lover. “What is guilt, George?”

“You want a real definition, Judge—one to go in the textbooks?”

“That would be valuable.”

“Guilt is what makes you send for Sweeney Fishberg. Good night”

Cass drove home by streets dreary with the packed and sooted snow of late winter, to finish up the unhappiest labor he had ever known: packing Jinny’s clothes and trinkets to send them to her in Connecticut.

It was like preparing a beloved body for burial.

Small white wool socks, “bobby socks” they were called, to be worn with bare legs that were made-up to look tanned. He could see her legs, the gloss of them speckled with tiny dots. He sighed and packed the socks, patting them down in the top tray of her trunk, wondering whether he would ever see them again.

Airy dresses, so flimsy and empty now, yet, as he fitted them on hangers, recalling her swiftness and grace. Blouses and white silk underclothes, which he found decorously folded in her bureau; a boyish scarf, which she had loved for picnicking, and a sweater, straight and prim, the curve of her breast gone from it; scuffed tramping shoes, which recalled to him just when she had got this scratch on one toe as they had bushwhacked through the woods by Dead Squaw Lake, The nightgown which she had worn on her last night at home. Round the shoulders were tiny wrinkles from her sleeping. It seemed to him still warm from her body.

Her sketch-book, with gently spiteful drawings of Boone Havock’s bulkiness and Roy Drover’s tough jaw . . . and Bradd Criley resting easy and masterful on a golf stick, and Cass himself, put into the costume of a cardinal.

The volume of Yeats that he had given to her and that she had loved: the old edition, the blue cover with the falling leaves, the cross, the mystic rose. He fumbled through it to a poem he had read to her, sitting on windy Ojibway Hill:

All the heavy days are over; Leave the body’s colored pride Underneath the grass and clover, With the feet laid side by side.

He saw Jinny lying stilled in the cumbersome earth. As he closed the book, he noticed a corner of paper sticking from it, and pulled out a note:

How’s for a swim this evening? You would comfort the lonely heart of Bradd.

Cass grimly replaced the note in the book, packed it, closed the trunk.

But next morning, when the trunk was carried out by the expressmen, it was as though her coffin were being borne out of the house for the last time—the house that would not quicken again to her voice and her light running; carried over the threshold which she had always crossed so gallantly, unaided.

An Assemblage of Husbands and Wives

VINCENT & CERISE OSPREY

Probably no duller nor more careful attorney had ever been graduated from Oberlin College and the Yale Law School than Mr. Vincent Osprey; probably no more devoted or less skillful husband had ever existed; and certainly no more placidly selfish wife has been recorded than Cerise, his consort.

She wanted fine clothes, furs, jewelry, automobiles, perfumes, and English biscuits imported in tins; she wanted power, admiration, and beauty; and neither Vincent’s income nor Vincent’s influence was large enough to provide them.

Cerise never drank too much, and never fished for anything more than fair words and a handshake from men. She did not expect them to give her the treasures she longed for; she went beyond that, and wanted them of her own right. But she was a collector of celebrities. She simply had to have the great ones of the town— the mayor, the judges, the millionaires such as the Wargates, the Grannicks, and Berthold Eisenherz—at her table, and she expected Vincent to persuade them to leave their nice warm houses to go and eat petrified fowl at the residence of a minor attorney.

Vince did once coax Webb and Louise Wargate to the house for her, but he spent the evening in excitedly overselling Cerise’s talents to them, and they did not come again. She very properly punished him, and for a month, whenever he tried to kiss her, his lips reached nothing but her strong white teeth. She said, “Most wives would just let you go on making a fool of yourself, but I happen to be honest.”

She went resolutely to his office and examined his books; she knew exactly how much money he had; and yet she charged up bills that he could not meet, and so endangered his small stock of credit and his smaller stock of sanity. He was unavoidably in debt for his insurance, his club memberships, and the installments on the refrigerator, the car, the radio, and even the house, for naturally he was one of those optimistic Americans who acquired these tribal adornments on the installment-plan.

He tried to scold her about it, but she did not spit at him. She had found a retort that was much more dramatic and self-congratulatory: she over-apologized, and admired herself for her humility in doing it. She was sorry; she had been blind, thoughtless, bad; he must think she was a perfect fool; she was sorry, OH she was so sorry!

As she said it, it was evident that she was thinking, “What a miracle of modesty and good manners I am, to apologize to this little squirt!”

When she had finished, she immediately hastened out to begin running up a new bill or to insult the wife of his best client.

She did not treat only Vince to these improvisations on the theme of humility. She also played her so-sorriness for the neighbors from whom she had borrowed cocktail glasses, table-cloths, and money, which she never returned till the owners demanded them. She was a good actress. She could make her repentances more infuriating than the original injuries.

They had one child, a small son, whom she taught to “forgive his father for his meanness.”

Vince was not so sub-human that he did not occasionally threaten a rebellion. Once, when they were driving to Minneapolis and he stopped at a village gasoline-station to fill the tank, she wandered up Main Street and did not come back for half an hour. On her return, he took a strong foreign-office attitude:

“Some day when you do that, I’m going to drive off and leave you.”

She looked at him a long time, then: “I hope to God you will. Some of the hicks in this dump look like real men. Maybe I could promote one of them into something better than a title-searcher!”

When the war came, Vince was still of draft age, and he waited to be called. Cerise immediately found an office job in the Wargate plant; learned not only stenography but something about the manufacture of wallboard, and became a real Career Woman, an office politician and an intriguer against the women whose jobs she wanted. Within a year she was receiving seventy-five dollars a week.

Theoretically, she was paying a woman to care for her son, but Vince paid the woman and Cerise blew in on dresses and bracelets all of the seventy-five—and more. She said that they could not afford a maid. She started with the noon shift, and before he left for his office, he laid out breakfast for her. The complaints about her extravagance which he dared not make to her face he hinted about in notes which he left for her in the refrigerator.

She told the women in the office about this cowardly and exasperating trick.

The Wargate staff presently offered her a job in their new Racine plant, at ninety a week, as personnel officer. She went home to tell Vince. She would be going in a week.

“You can’t leave me—and the boy!” he wailed.

“Well, I wouldn’t mind taking the kid along, if I thought it was good for him, but YOU, my dear Vinsolent, I hope I never hear another of your dear old Yale songs again!”

During the week before she left him, Vince had to talk with someone about the loss of his wife, or go mad, but as he had no other intimates, the only person with whom he could talk was that wife. She was not helpful. He begged her to tell him what to do, and she suggested that he kill himself.

Presumably she did not mean it.

When she was gone, this correct young man, who for years had trained himself to get eight hours’ sleep, to do exercises before the window for ten minutes every morning, to swim twice a week in the Y.M.C.A. pool, never to use any word more foul than “Damn,” and nightly to kneel by his bed and say “Now I lay me down to sleep” as he had done ever since he was three—this model young lawyer within one week became a haggard hobo, unshaven, staggering, publicly and noisily drunk, slobbering in saloons till he was ordered out.

Judge Cass Timberlane, a man whom Vince revered, though the Judge was only eight or nine years older than himself, came calling on him, where he lay dirty in his dirty bed, and urged him to go away, travel, forget. Vince sobbed that it was too late and he had already “gone to the bad,” but the Judge assured him that he, too, had once fallen to pieces, even smaller and worse pieces than Vince’s.

He knew that the Judge’s own wife was away from him, and gossips were hinting that she had gone for good—and for bad. He cried over the Judge’s hand, and promised to be brave. He telegraphed to the man with whom he had roomed in Oberlin, but whom he had not seen for five years, to meet him in Chicago, and they would “have reunion and high old time.”

They met, took a room together at a hotel, and had a distressingly dull do-you-remember dinner at the hotel cafe. After the first spurt, they could think of nothing to say.

Vince excused himself. He was expecting a call from Racine, from his dear wife, Cerise. He would be back in ten minutes. The friend waited half an hour, and went up to their room. The window was open, and twelve stories below, on the roof of an annex, a ragpile of clothing, was Vincent Osprey.

Cerise came to Grand Republic for the funeral, and wept, but she caught a train back to Racine that evening, leaving her son in the care of her sister.

She told this sister that she was a modern woman, and just as clear-minded as any man. And indeed the young man who met her at the station in Racine was nothing like so clear-minded as Cerise, who was paying his room-rent.