The Just And The Unjust (21 page)

'Huh!' said Harry, 'a little bird, must have been a buzzard, told me that even you had simple aspirations 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.'

'Gosh,' said Abner, 'that's a romantic idea!' He stood up. 'Say, was that the bell? My watch is wrong.'

Coming into the lobby to pay their checks at the cashier's desk, they could hear the heavy tolling from the courthouse tower signalling five minutes to go.

3

In the shadows and heat of the afternoon Harry Wurts grew warmer as he worked on Leming. Harry's face was red; his cheeks shone with moisture, and little beads of sweat caught in the quarter-inch hairs of his sandy moustache; but he worked without distress. Like an athlete warmed to the game, the more he sweated, the better he felt. He tackled his hard problem with all his might, elatedly bucking the odds against him.

The books tell you that the object of cross-examination is to sift the evidence and to try the credibility of the witness. This may be done by showing that the witness has little or no means of knowing what he is talking about, or that his memory for facts is poor anyway, or that his motives are crooked and self-interested, or that his character is such that nothing he says should be believed. Harry had no wish to sift strong evidence —a fool's trick, in which you bring out, and with telling effect because you do it, any points in your opponent's favour that he might have overlooked. Harry could hardly hope to show that Leming had no means of knowing the facts, or that his memory was at fault. As for Leming's motive, that was conceded. He was testifying to save his skin. Harry's best hope, and a poor one, was to show that Leming ought not to be believed. There, as in the matter of motive, he was unfortunately anticipated. Harry could not make impressive the point about Leming being a criminal or a drug addict, because the jury already knew. Harry, questioning Leming on his criminal record, only bored the jury. The long series of arrests and trials and short prison terms fell, if anything, short of the mark set by the jurors' imaginations. At this stage they asked themselves not: Can such things be? but: Is that all he did?

When regular approaches, felt out carefully, proved all to be blocked, there remained for the man with the temerity to use them, irregular ones; and Harry was that man. The cardinal principle, never cross-examine at random, posited a working hypothesis that would be good enough to convince a jury if the opposition allowed it to stand. It stood or fell in so far as the facts, or most of them, fitted in. Anybody could see the folly of deliberately asking for more facts on the off-chance that they would prove to be facts for which there was a place. The measure of Harry's resource was the bold admission to himself that the only hypothesis the facts would fit was the Commonwealth's own. The measure of his hardihood was his decision to admit his client's guilt, to abandon the strong position prepared for him by the law in its presumption of his client's innocence. The measure of his acumen was his cool grasp of the fundamentally changed position. The shoe was on the other foot. Bunting would have to find a place for every random fact Harry turned up, so the more the merrier. The only plan Harry had or needed was to go in wherever the Commonwealth paused or backed off, and lug out whatever was there.

Harry said, 'Now during this period, you mentioned a trip to New York on which you were gone several days. Was that something you just made up?'

Leming said, 'I went to New York.'

'And what did you go to New York for?'

'Well,' said Leming, 'I went over to get something for myself.'

'Ah?' said Harry. 'What?'

'Some narcotic,' Leming said. His manner was deeply distressed. Perhaps he really was ashamed to have to confess his vice; but it was also possible — Leming exhibited curious little flashes of shrewdness — that he knew very well that shamefaced testimony always passed as credible testimony; and a man who confessed what he seemed to want to conceal often gained more from the apparent triumph of honesty over dishonest inclination than he could lose from the substance of the confession.