Scene 4--she had reread the play in the afternoon. A catalytic action,

although it had been a seemingly random choice, a turning to Shakespeare for relief, illumination, distraction, and something more, in a time of trouble, as another might have turned to music, or physical exertion, or the warmth of a friend. Her thought still rang with it, reverberated, and she understood now that the choice had not been random at all: "_Let me be cruel, not unnatural: I will speak daggers to her, but use none._" "Your father was drunk, Callista, otherwise I don't suppose even he could have been so heedless as to leave that bottle where a child could knock it over. Is that what you wanted to know?"

"No. That's only what you've told me before. Drunk?"

"Of course."

"It keeps coming back to me that his face was burning."

"What?"

"His face was burning. It was the malaria. Wasn't it? You've told me yourself, he brought that home from New Guinea, latent but never cured."

"Oh, he had that, yes. A mild form."

"Mother, malaria is not mild if it gives you recurrent fevers and collapse. I've read up on it. I had to, trying to understand."

"You're very full of book knowledge, certainly."

"I've found more truth in books than in people. A mild form--why, two years later he _died_ of it, didn't he?"

"Now, my dear, your father died, and I think you know this perfectly well, of pneumonia. The doctor informed me that the malaria was at most a--a complicating factor. The pneumonia was induced by exposure, and that in turn was caused by his passing out, as they call it, on a January night, in a drunken stupor, on his way home from a bar."

"A drunken stupor, or a blinding fever. I was seven; I remember hearing you answer the telephone--the hospital, I suppose it was, where they'd taken him. I'd been put to bed long before, but wasn't sleeping. You were having drinks or something with Cousin Trent, after Aunt Cora and Uncle Tom Winwood left. I even remember hearing Aunt Cora say good night, and then your voice going on a long time, to Cousin Trent. I don't suppose I heard many of the words, but I knew the tone, the one you always used when you were explaining Father's shortcomings."

"Callista!"

"Wait! I must tell you what I remember, but not about this; I mean the earlier time, two years earlier. Let me tell you what I remember of that, and then I'll go. I remember running into the studio, dragging my red fire-engine. Father was on the couch. He'd been working, the big table was littered with his things. He sat up and smiled and held out his arms to me. I climbed into his lap. When he kissed me his face was burning, his hands shaking. I know he talked to me, but the words won't come back. Except 'Draw me a big horse and a little horse.' Then I remember lying belly-down on the floor, working with crayons--the horses, I suppose. And he went out of the room, for quinine probably--he had an allergic reaction to atabrine in the Army, didn't he?"

"Something like that. Callista, I can't see--"

"It was morning, Mother. Sunlight in that east window. Shining aslant across the things on his work-table. From what I've learned, what I can remember and piece together, I don't believe my father would have been drunk in the morning."

"Callista, is this your time of the month?"

"No, God damn it."

"Really! Callista, I must ask you to control yourself."

"I was never colder. I think I must have a fuller memory than most. It comes back, how serious I was about the drawing, at going-on-five. Precocious. I still possess some talent that way."

"Callista, as you know, you have a quite considerable talent that way, if you would learn to discipline it, and--well, and outgrow your taste for the unpleasantly morbid and erotic subjects that seem to attract you so much. I have never understood in fact why you chose to be so childishly disagreeable a year ago when I ventured to show some of your--your less controversial drawings to the Thursday Society. Very well, I should have asked your consent, being merely your mother. Now Mrs. Wilberforce, who is after all an art teacher of somewhat wider experience than yours, to say nothing of having written and illustrated a number of altogether charming children's books, Mrs. Wilberforce felt that one or two of those drawings showed distinct promise. Distinct promise."

"Yes, Mrs. W.'s a nice lady. O Mother, so much comes back! Spring of 1945--he was invalided home a whole year before then, wasn't he? 1944? Didn't I have him a whole year before my face was burned? Why are you crying? Wasn't it 1944?"

"1944? Yes, he came home that year. And to think, she even offered to let you try some illustrations for one of her own books, was willing to instruct you, help you in every possible way!"

"Who?--oh, Wilberforce. Yes, she's nice--what a pity the books are garbage. Why are you crying? Cousin Trent? That little man?"

"Trent--why, I never--Callista, you are hysterical."

"I was never colder. 'Mother, you have my father much offended.'"

"What? What are you saying?"

"I'm not thinking of Cousin Trent--that doesn't matter. It couldn't matter if you sneaked into the sheets with him a hundred times--"

"Callista!"

"It doesn't matter, I said. The real infidelity was in the way you treated my father, day to day, the nagging, belittlement, the wearing down, little needles of disparagement, mental castration--but I don't think you ever managed that, I think he stayed a man. I was seven when he died--you think I couldn't feel what you were doing to him, and can't remember it? I do. Even more I think of how you've gone on since then, trying to destroy him for me--why, in your view nothing he ever did was good, or wise, or even honorable. Isn't that why you cut me off from Aunt Cora Winwood--because she knew better? Mother, he was one of the gentle ones--a fault if you like--is that what you held against him? That he couldn't black your eye when you needed it? Mother, I have three paintings he did to please himself, escape from commercial work. Just three. He must have done a great deal that was never sold. There must have been sketches, unfinished things, portfolios put aside. I never asked you this before, afraid of the answer I think: what became of that work?"

"I simply will not endure any more of this."

"What became of my father's work?"

"Oh, if you mean--well, when we moved here from New York, and there was so much--"

"I was right then. You threw it away?"

"If you will control yourself and listen reasonably: yes, your father did leave certain drawings and paintings which were very obviously done to please himself, as you put it. They were--I am sorry, Callista--they were vile. No one could call me a prude, but there are certain limits--"

"Now it's out."

"Callista, I must ask--"

"They were all destroyed, all his visions? Everything beyond the level of, say, the Thursday Society--destroyed? Everything? You didn't save one charcoal sketch, one line drawing, one bit of a doodle on scratch paper? If you did I'll stay, to beg you for it--or steal it if I can. I want nothing else from you, ever, but for one scrap of my father's work I'd go on my knees."

"Callista, you are out of your mind."

"'Mother, for love of grace, lay not that flattering unction to your soul, that not your trespass but my madness speaks.'"

"Oh, this morbid dramatizing, this neurotic--quoting 'Hamlet' at me as if I--are you _laughing_?"

"Not very much. I was thinking how neither poor Herb nor Cousin Trent fits the picture very well--it doesn't matter. There's more than one way to pour poison in the ear of a king. You did it with words, millions of little nibbling words, all the years he lived with you and--and for a final dirty joke of the fates, begot me--but I think he knew I loved him, as much as a child's capable of loving, maybe it gave him something, after all he couldn't see ahead. And I was thinking: I must write to Aunt Cora, I think she'd remember the crazy brat who adored her and then couldn't come to see her any more, because Tom Winwood d-r-rinks! She might have some of his work, and might send me to friends of his, people you never knew. I was thinking, Mother, how differently you'd feel if his work could be recognized, now that he's been safely dead for twelve years. What a change! Then you'd be--what, his inspiration?"

"Callista, don't! Stop it! Do you have to break my heart completely? What have I done?"

"'Such an act'--oh, poor Mother, nothing, nothing at all. Maybe that's the worst of it. You've done nothing, just lived inside the shell of your own vanity--as everyone does, I suppose. I'm sorry, Mother. It's all right, I'm going, and I won't come back. My own vanity tricked me into saying too much, but you'll forget, and go on in your own way. I haven't changed anything. 'Assume a virtue if you have it not'--remember? 'Forgive me this my virtue, for in the fatness of these pursy times'--you don't have one little scrap, a three-line scrawl on the back of an envelope?"

Callista's mother, weeping with her head on her arms, did not answer that. To Callista, standing in the doorway not yet able to turn and go, it seemed as though all hatred and resentment had drained away suddenly from within her; including the old dark aching hatred for herself, which until then had seldom released her except at certain times in the warm presence of Edith Nolan. She would have liked to cross the room, try for some physical contact implying comfort and forgiveness with that stranger over there who still made strangled sounds of self-pity and other kinds of pain, all of them real. But having no confidence in her skill at such gestures, no illusion that a relation thus broken could ever be repaired, and fearing to lose the new-found inner quiet, Callista only said: "Good night, Mother." Downstairs then, pausing on the landing, her hand tightening on the rail as she waited on the passing of a curious nausea. Too early for the sickness of pregnancy, wasn't it? Nothing else wrong, and the nausea did pass. "_My pulse, as yours, doth temperately keep time._"

She wondered, standing there still faintly sick, how the self of a week before could possibly have knelt in that wild garden, pulled up those innocently wicked plants, broken off the roots to be dropped in her handbag, and thought: _This way would solve everything and hardly hurt at all._ Yet the self of a week before had done that; the self of a few hours past had glanced at the brandy bottle, death dissolved and waiting, and had thought: _Have it out with Mother--there could be some of his work, maybe buried in the attic where my searching never uncovered it--and then, then probably_--

The self pausing on the landing, hand letting go the rail and moving again softly, shelteringly, over the secret life in the womb, had thought practically and sensibly: _Throw away that stunk-up mess as soon as you get home._ And the self of twenty minutes later, arriving at the apartment with a burden of abnormal fatigue and drowsiness, had forgotten--(_is there any true forgetting this side of death?_)--forgotten all about bottle and canister, everything except bed.

The self on the landing thought: _It's all right, Funny Thing, look, it's all right, I'm going to bear you. I'm going to take care of you. I can do that. I will._ Had wondered, incidentally, if the small bra wasn't already a bit tight. The girl on the landing ran a finger lightly along the column of her neck--wasn't there slightly more fullness, softness? _Should go to a dentist too--and--oh, lots of little chores. Never mind anyhow, Funny Thing, never mind the details, it's going to be all right for you and me._

The self seated on the cot where Kowalski had left her stood up uncertainly, with a sense of listening, although she knew Kowalski was gone, Watson was keeping quiet, the night also was in a deep hush with no longer that occasional whine of wind beyond the barred glass. No one had spoken. _Unless I did._

She glanced at the window, uneasy as though the blank of winter night beyond it had paled, and might show again some light or color if she stared patiently enough. No. Not that window. Not that blank. And no true sound of speech.

She stood with eyes closed and hands pressed over her ears. Waiting; and hearing at least the dull noise--muffled, as it ought to be on the other side of a closed door--of a bottle, heavy glass, drawn across resonant wood from the back of a shelf. Faint pop of a cork and clink of glass, and tap of high heels: "Callie, come on now! I poured a little drink for you." And that fool lying frozen on the bed down there--why, how long had that fool held herself frozen, knowing everything?

How long before that fool was telling herself: _I didn't really hear her, I couldn't make out what she said_--how long? Whining maybe before the Blank shut down complete: _It wasn't anything I did, I wasn't there, I couldn't move, anyway how could I know she'd drink it herself?_ Saying later (O the Blank!) in righteous innocence to Mr. Lamson: "I don't know, I can't remember." Screaming in the secret heart where not even Cecil could hear it and understand: _I don't want to know! I don't want to remember!_

Eyes open, hands fallen, she noticed by the cot the handful of trifling possessions allowed her. She fumbled through it, unsure what she sought until her fingers held the lipstick pencil. To the wall then, dizzy and obliged to lean against the cool plaster while her hand labored, but the effort was interesting; she could feel wryly, justifiably certain that no hand had ever written _these_ words on _this_ wall, ever before. She stood back, dizziness gone, and saw how the red letters in the dim light took on a magnificence, a glory like tranquillity:

I AM GUILTY.

IV

Edith Nolan pressed her fingertips over eyes grown tired from work. Possibly when she opened them and looked again at the broad sheet of drawing paper on the table, she would know whether her curious urgency of the last hour, the sense of good achievement that had driven her to this exhaustion, had been something more than self-deception. A glance at her wrist watch before she closed away vision had told her it was past one in the morning. Time to quit, if she was not to arrive for the next courtroom session hopelessly unintelligent from weariness and lack of sleep.

She lowered her hands, looking very briefly down. The faces, hands, shadows of the big drawing did leap astonishingly into life; but she said half-aloud: "Not yet." She got up without another look at it and crossed the room to stand, huddling in the blue bathrobe stiff and a little cold, before Callista's watercolor of a pine tree on a windy hill. She could not quite see Callista's vision, or not as much of it as she wished; she resisted a while longer the pull of what waited for her back at the drawing table. _It may be_, she thought. _This once I just may have done it._

In the past, no work of her own had ever pleased Edith Nolan enough to give her a complete sense of belonging by natural right in that small company who can now and then draw from the confusion of the world's raw material a new synthesis, a work of disciplined imagination worthy to last a while. She knew the company, in books, music, painting; and in at least one other person: Callista, who belonged there so inevitably that the girl had probably never even wondered whether she had a "right" to call herself an artist. In need of hard work and long study, yes, but Callista knew it, and while she had struggled and learned and enjoyed the struggle, she had still been drawing and painting as naturally as a robin sings in the morning.

Sam Grainger had considered that he did not belong. "I'm a performer," he said once, "so I may get well-to-do some day; and a performer, as of course you've noticed, Red-Top, can be an awful nice guy, _but_ ... but God damn it, I can't compose, and I have a most un-American impulse to get down and lick the boots of anyone who can."

She remembered saying: "Why, you're creative." Sam had just grunted, inarticulately annoyed. In those days Edith had not been fully aware of the dismal condition rapidly overtaking that once honorable word, and Sam had been surprisingly insensitive to words and the rich changeable life of words, as if he could hear only one kind of music, or believed other kinds irrelevant. Nowadays Edith's skin crawled when the corpse of the word "creative" was being kicked around. It gave off a squashy noise; was almost as offensively decayed as the corpse of "heritage." Today everything's creative, including beauty culture, business letters, and the application of new superlatives to old laxatives. There was, Edith had heard, an operation known as "creative selling." We wait perhaps, she thought, for the day when the market will offer a creative toilet as an aid to positive thinking.

Reluctant, not quite frightened, Edith returned to the drawing table and looked down at twelve pen-and-ink faces. They returned the gaze, with intensity, with the force, savor, complexity of an authentic life that no exploration could ever exhaust. _But--my hand--My hand?_

Certainly no other. Technique of course; that much, after long effort of years, Edith could take for granted. But this--wasn't it beyond technique?

For the first time that evening--it had been nowhere near her while she was deep in work--Edith recalled Daumier's "The Jury." She took down the volume of his work, not trusting memory. After the comparison she could say _No_: a round, unworried, satisfying _No_. This curious thing of her own, this hating-fearing-loving-pitying distillation of the jury in _People vs. Blake_, owed no more to Daumier (or to Callista) than any work should honestly owe to whatever the artist has encountered in the past. Conception, development, fulfillment--unmistakably a Nolan original. Perhaps the first.

The drawing frightened her then in a different way, grown temporarily larger than her mind's resistance. These people were all looking at her, as the twelve faces of flesh and blood had seemed to for a moment in the afternoon, when someone in the row behind her had a loud coughing spell. They looked at her now, bloated Hoag and ancient Emerson Lake and cloth-brained Emma Beales and kindly Helen Butler, and by a trick of her exhausted mind they made her no longer Edith Nolan but a woman at the defense table, whose life would end or begin afresh somehow according to the will of those twelve imperfect beings. Who meant well; who wanted to "do the right thing," whatever that was; who (except maybe Hoag) wouldn't dream of turpentining a dog or pulling the wings off flies or starving a child.

She forced herself out of that illusion. Well, the illusion was at least fair evidence of power in the work. She warned herself: _Discount everything: tired; the illusion is strong because of personal involvement in People vs. Blake; by morning the pen-and-ink may be ashes._ But leaving it, turning out the light, Edith almost knew that it would not.

And she marveled, with something like the wonder of a child to whom all discovery is fresh and nothing worn down to the stale and bromidic, at the stubborn power of life to draw out of mold and decay an oak tree or a flower; out of confusion or sorrow a work of enduring good.

5

It is indeed some Excuse to be mad with the greater Part of Mankind.

ERASMUS, _Colloquies_

I

Answering T. J. Hunter's inquiry about her occupation, Mrs. Phelps Jason of Shanesville replied in her own time and manner: "I am a widow with a limited private income, not employed in the usual sense, certainly not unemployed in the sense of idle. I manage my Shanesville property as a wild life sanctuary, and am Secretary of the Winchester County Anti-Vivisection League."

Judge Mann exhaled. One of those; human, however. In the minute-book, belatedly, he entered the date, December 9, and the witness's name. On the pad he sketched a dour bluejay cuddling field glasses.

"Mrs. Jason, how did you spend the afternoon of Friday, August 7th?"

She made no fussy business of verifying the date. "On that day I attended a picnic given by my neighbors, Dr. and Mrs. Herbert Chalmers."

"Who were the others present, if you recall?"

"Besides Dr. and Mrs. Chalmers, there were Mr. and Mrs. James Doherty, Mr. Nathaniel Judd, and Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Wayne of Shanesville with their two children. Also Miss Maud Welsh and Callista Blake."

"Are you well acquainted with the defendant, Callista Blake?"

"Reasonably well. I met her first in 1951, when she was eleven. That is eight years." Mann sighed and relaxed. Eight years ago, law practice at Mann and Wheatley already routine: 1951 was the Forman will case; and spare-time reading in constitutional law with old Joe Wheatley, Uncle Norden a dusty memory; and creeping up on forty.

"You've been continuously acquainted with Miss Blake all that time?"

"Yes. Of course I saw less of her after she moved to Winchester."

"At that picnic, August 7th, did you have any talk with her?"

"No. We waved or nodded I suppose, when I arrived. Those picnics are quite informal. The fact that I had no talk with her was accidental; I was engaged with the other guests, and she was spending her time with the Wayne children."

"All her time?"

"Why, yes, until about 3:30 anyhow."

"Did anything noteworthy happen then?"

"I don't know if I can judge what's noteworthy, Mr. Hunter."

Mann's attention sharpened at the hint of hostility. Was this State's witness by any chance intending to pull the rug out from under Hunter?

"I'll rephrase my question. At 3:30, did anything happen important enough so that you now remember it and wish to tell it under oath?"

"It's not a question of my wishing to tell it, Mr. Hunter. I do not. If I may use an old-fashioned and unpopular word, it's a matter of duty. At 3:30 Callista went alone into a wild garden back of the lawn."

"Are you yourself familiar with that wild garden?"

"Yes."

"I ask you to show the jury, on this map, the location and extent of the wild garden. And describe it in your own words, if you will."

Tense but self-contained, Mrs. Jason stood by the map, her hands moving intelligently, her voice firm and rather pleasant. Mann recalled that she had given her age as forty-seven; his own age; more weathered than himself in the face, but an outdoor type, possibly better preserved, her figure attractive and graceful. "The wild garden area is roughly square, about a hundred feet on a side. It's closed away from the lawn by a mixed hedge of forsythia and lilac. There's only one break in that hedge, an angled passage about two feet wide. It's marked here--"

"Angled--you mean the opening is on a slant?"

"Double slant, zigzag. The hedge is ten or twelve feet thick--that forsythia will take over everything. I understand the little passage has to be pruned out fresh every year."

"If it's a zigzag, then you can't look through from the lawn area into the wild garden--is that correct?"

"Correct. From the lawn it looks like an unbroken hedge. Well, the wild garden itself is just a patch where everything's been left more or less natural. There's an old paper birch. Hardy perennials."

"In earlier testimony, the plant monkshood was mentioned in connection with that wild garden. Have you seen it growing there?"

"Yes." She spoke reluctantly, returning to the witness chair.

"After 3:30, when did you next see Callista Blake?"

"About quarter past four, getting into her Volkswagen."

"You didn't see her come out of that wild garden?"

"No, I didn't happen to. I think I'd gone indoors for a while."

"You're quite certain she went into the wild garden alone? The children couldn't have gone with her, or perhaps ahead of her?"

"No, they didn't. Shortly before 3:30 Doris Wayne--she's ten--started an argument with her younger brother Billy. Mrs. Wayne reproved them, told them to sit by the picnic table and restrain their voices. They did." Mrs. Jason glacially smiled. "The origin of the argument--"

"Well, that might lead us too far afield. Just--"

"If the Court please--" Cecil Warner cleared his throat with sudden but stately sonority--"I submit that, to appease the curiosity of all present including myself, the _casus belli_ between Doris and William Wayne, though doubtless not part of the _res gestae_, should be made known." Cecil was even standing, making a production of it, announcing with eyebrows and twinkle that all he wanted was to have a bit of ponderous fun and relieve the tension: what could be more innocent?

Risky, but Mann wanted to play along. He said: "Mm, yes. The rules of evidence should not debar us from ascertaining the gravamen of this ancillary conflict." _How'm I doing, Cecil? Gravamen, ancillary, each five dollars, please._ Hunter looked uneasy, not prepared with any elephantine humor of his own.

"Well, your Honor, Callista had been showing Doris Wayne how to make a squeak by blowing across a grass-blade held between the thumbs. The effect on neighboring eardrums is impressive. The argument I mentioned arose when Billy wished to perfect himself in the same peculiar art and was informed by his sister that he was not old enough."

Mann let the courtroom rumble while Cecil Warner sat down poker-faced. Now the jury could never quite forget that this was a girl who could play with children; that the children must have liked her; that children are often "judges of character" and so--maybe--

Callista this morning was looking different. Since she first appeared Judge Mann's gaze had been repeatedly drawn to her as he tried to discover the nature of the change. No make-up, dressed the same, the white blouse more wilted. But her cheeks showed faint color; her mouth was not set in such a bitter line. Once or twice when Warner whispered to her she smiled, a flash of light almost shocking in its unexpected sweetness. And when her thin face was relaxed, perhaps the only word for it this morning was--peacefulness. With no change in the circumstances, with the troubled honest woman on the stand obviously about to do a little more toward destroying her from a sense of duty, what had Callista Blake to do with peacefulness? He noticed also that redheaded Edith Nolan had managed to get a seat one row nearer the arena, and her candid blue eyes seldom left the face of her friend.

"Mrs. Jason, did you notice Callista Blake talking with anyone but the children that afternoon?"

"When she was leaving, I saw Dr. Chalmers standing by her car talking with her, and the children ran over to say good-bye."

"No one else?"

Mrs. Jason shrugged. "Everything informal--acquaintances of long standing, no occasion for formal gestures."

"How was Miss Blake dressed that day?"

"Brown skirt, green blouse, very nice with her color."

"Did you notice a shoulder-strap bag?"

"Yes."

"Were you aware of any constraint, or hostility, between Callista Blake and any of the guests at that picnic?"

"Conclusions of the witness."

Mann said: "I'll rule it admissible. But limit yourself to the single question, Mrs. Jason."

"The answer is no, I wasn't aware of any such thing."

"Early this year, before the first of May, did you learn--by direct observation--of anything unusual about the relation existing between Callista Blake and James Doherty?"

"Objection! Leading the witness. No relevance established."

"The relevance is direct, to the question of motive."

"Objection overruled."

"Exception."

"Shall I repeat my question, Mrs. Jason?"

"You needn't. The answer is no."

"What about after the first of May?"

"I learned on the 12th of May that there was a love affair between Callista Blake and Jim Doherty." Her brusque answer, shoving aside legal caution, came on a note of regret that Mann thought could not be false. Her mind precise, somewhat fanatic, Mrs. Jason would be a truth-teller at any cost. Never knowingly unjust according to her own standards, she might wish to temper duty with kindness, but her habits of self-rule would not allow much of that. "Shall I tell of this in my own words?"

"Yes, please."

"Very early on the morning of May 12th, about two o'clock, I was walking up Summer Avenue toward the junction with Walton Road. I take walks at night sometimes, to observe the activities of wild things, also because I sleep poorly. A short walk is sometimes helpful. I knew Mrs. Doherty was away for a visit of a few days with her parents in Philadelphia, by the way. As I walked down the road toward the Doherty house there were no lights in it. I was wearing tennis shoes, walking quietly. Near the Dohertys' driveway I heard the voices of Jim Doherty and Callista, both very individual voices and of course familiar to me. They were standing together in the drive. Jim's car was there, pointed toward the road. Moonlight--I was partly hidden by roadside bushes--I'm sure they didn't see or hear me. As I was about to retreat, they sat down on the grass near the car and were then turned more toward me, would almost certainly have seen me if I had moved. The--the situation was such that I could not let them know I was there--too painful for all three of us."

"But I must now ask what if anything you saw or overheard."

"Oh--Jim said: 'What are we going to do?' And Callista said: 'There aren't so many solutions, Jimmy. Find a little strength anyway, it isn't the end of the world.' And he--I did not hear his answer."

"What else was said?"

"Callista said: 'The only real solution is one I'm not ready to face, Jimmy.' I heard nothing else that she said."

"They were just sitting there on the grass?"

She frowned. Judge Mann saw her lips move.

"I'm afraid the jury didn't hear you, Mrs. Jason."

"I said, she was holding his head to her breast."

"Your witness, Mr. Warner."

Warner stood by the defense table, one hand maintaining contact with it. "In that overheard conversation, Mrs. Jason, the name of Ann--Mrs. Doherty--was not mentioned by either of them?"

"No, sir. I've repeated everything I heard."

"Did they learn of your presence there?"

"No. I slipped away. I saw the car--well, if it matters--"

"Go ahead."

"When I was nearly to my house, I saw the car come out of the drive and go toward the Walton Road junction."

"All you learned, actually, was that some sort of love relation had evidently developed between these two?"

"Yes, sir, that's all I learned."

"Mrs. Jason, I take you to be a literate person and a lover of truth. As such, I ask you to consider the thing you've quoted Callista as saying: 'The only real solution is one I'm not ready to face.' Would you agree that such a remark, made under the conditions you have described, could be interpreted in many different ways?"

"Yes, certainly."

"For example, whatever it was she referred to may have seemed, at the time, to a nineteen-year-old girl, like 'the only real solution,' and yet the words don't give another person any actual clue as to what she meant?"

"That's true."

"As a lover of truth, would you also agree that you do not know, at first hand, one single fact, or group of facts, which would justify an inference that the love relation between these two people was responsible for the death two months later of Ann Doherty?"

T. J. Hunter was examining his fingernails with labored disgust. Mrs. Jason said at last: "That is true. I know they were in love with each other for a while; I know Ann died. So far as genuine knowledge is concerned, that's all I do know, Mr. Warner."

"Thank you. No further questions."

If he had been defense counsel, Mann was thinking, he would probably have gone too far with the woman, perhaps losing everything in the hope of winning a little more. _For a lawyer I'm not the damn type._ And Mann reminded himself that there is no type. You recognize a few general patterns, but the simplest human individual is not to be duplicated in a billion centuries.

A ruddy gray-haired man was being sworn in. Paunchy, scant of breath, his prominent eyes had the directionless belligerency of a man in some habitual dread of being laughed at. "Nathaniel Judd, sir, senior partner in the firm of Judd and Doherty."

"The junior partner is Mr. James Doherty, correct?"

"Yes, sir. Since 1955."

"Your business is real estate and general insurance?"

"Yes, sir." Judd spoke breathily on a while about that. Overweight, poor and changeable color, slow motions when his body's natural habit should have been a jerky aggressiveness--maybe what he feared was not only laughter. Jack, with his comprehensive doctor's glance, might have seen Nathaniel Judd as a candidate for a coronary, if the man hadn't already suffered one. Judd was telling how his only son, killed in action in Korea, had been a close friend of James Doherty's overseas. Doherty had written when the boy died, and had looked up Judd after his discharge. "Much as anyone could," said short-breathed Judd, "he's been like another son to me. Took him into the firm, 1955. Fine head for business. Good boy. Sixty-one myself, not too active nowadays."

"Did you meet Mrs. Doherty also that year--1955?"

"Yes, sir, soon after they settled in Shanesville, they invited my wife and me to dinner. Very nice. Met her then. Played bridge."

"Did you meet the Chalmers family then too? And Miss Blake?"

"That summer anyhow. Miss Blake was fifteen." For a lumpily modeled face, Judd's was expressive. When he mentioned her, the blobby features sagged.

"You went to a picnic at the Chalmerses', 7th of August, this year?"

"Yes. Can't add anything to what Ella Jason testified."

But Hunter fussed at it a while. Mann's attention wandered. No individual like another, no one replaceable, not vague soft Judd for instance or any other. A commonplace: why go on worrying at it, insisting that no one is expendable? _Expendable_--the stink of that word lingered from a war already part forgotten, obscured by a more vast and quiet terror. Under the new terror the politics of 1959 had been squirming in a fantastic display of the passions of a disturbed ant hill. _Expendable_: well, the first to express this obscenity must have been some thick-browed operator of prehistory, who found his fellows could be manipulated by appropriate grunts and chest-thumpings into doing a concerted job of skull-busting and rape on those Bad People with a better campsite and interesting females. As the original inventor of advertising was the one (man or woman?) who first got the idea of tying a rag on the genitals.

Mann remembered how in the war years most people, having gagged a bit at the gnat of that word _expendable_, had then swallowed the camel of the fact with no great strain. _How does it happen that a man who transferred to the Medics mostly out of distaste for carrying a rifle is now a judge of General Sessions, in a state that keeps the death penalty on the books?_

"Have you met Miss Blake often since she moved to Winchester?"

"No, sir, hardly at all. We--hadn't much in common."

"I see. No ill feeling between you, was there?"

"No, sir, not that. I get along with people--try to." Judd looked more unhappy; perhaps he felt the prosecutor's silence pushing him. "Well--when I thought about it at all--guess I supposed she'd outgrow that cynical attitude, atheism, all that stuff."

"I object!" Warner spoke quietly and, for once, coldly. "Again the prosecution allows a witness to express loose, incompetent opinions."

"Objection sustained."

Hunter elaborated a patient smile. Judd looked bewildered and dismayed: what had _he_ done? Warner said: "My thanks to the Court. I will express the hope that religious bias will not again be injected."

Hunter's face flamed. "There's no religious issue injected!"

"The witness has chosen to call my client an atheist. The statement is incompetent: Mr. Judd has never actually learned Miss Blake's opinions on religious matters. Why should he? And since the question of religion is totally irrelevant here, what was the purpose of that remark if not to inflame prejudice? What was the purpose?"

Callista Blake--white, cool, unreasonably peaceful--did not look up, remaining in the country of her own thoughts.

Mann said: "Mr. Warner's objection has been sustained, because the Court agrees that the witness's remark was out of order. But Mr. Warner, you are out of line too in suggesting an intent to prejudice the jury. The witness spoke carelessly, as he should have been instructed not to do. It must not be supposed that he did so with malice. If it should later appear that a religious issue _is_ relevant, then let discussion of it be carried out in the closing arguments of prosecution and defense, not in the course of testimony, which must deal with facts. Counsel to the bench a moment, please."

Callista Blake did look up then, as Warner left her side. Mann felt the puzzled study of her eyes as the lawyers leaned to him, T. J. Hunter starting to whisper some comment on the clash, which Mann shut off with a wave of his hand. "Not that. T.J., your witness isn't looking good. Has he ever had a coronary, do you know?"

Hunter was startled. "Don't think so. Never said so."

"Was he that short of breath the last time you talked with him?"

"Sure. Just out of condition, I think, Judge."

Warner unobtrusively appraised Judd, and said nothing.

"All right. Watch it, both of you. Can't have him conking out."

"Mr. Judd, as a friend and business partner of James Doherty, have you often visited at his house in Shanesville?"

"Oh yes. Real often. Pretty near every month."

"Did Miss Blake ever call there when you were present?"

"No. Wait--I do remember one time. Before she moved to Winchester. Not a call exactly. Mrs. Judd and I had stayed with the Dohertys overnight, the weekend. Remember now, the girl came over Sunday morning when the four of us were getting into Jim's car to go to Mass. The Chalmerses wanted to give Jim and Ann some maple syrup they'd made on the place, and it was Miss Blake who brought it over. Spring of last year. Come to think, that was the last time I saw Miss Blake before she moved to Winchester."

"And after that, you say, you saw her hardly at all?"

Judd flushed and paled. "To be exact, sir, just once."

"Can you give us the exact date?"

"Friday, June 19th."

"And the place, and the time of day?"

"My office in Winchester. About ten in the evening."

"Please describe this occasion in your own way."

"Well, my secretary Miss Anderson had been out sick several days, so Jim and I were swamped with work. I left the office my usual time, took home some stuff. Jim said he'd stay and work late. Evening, found I'd forgotten something, drove back for it, near ten o'clock. Light on in Jim's office, door of the outer office braced open way I'd left it, for fresh air--guess that's how I came to go in so quiet, wasn't trying to, certainly. Passed doorway of Jim's office, saw Miss Blake was--in there." Judd swallowed and coughed. "Compromising situation."

"Do you mean they were embracing, something like that?"

"Call it that. Divan. Jim's office. Wouldn't've believed it."

"Was an innocent interpretation possible? She'd felt faint, or--"

"Nothing like that, sir. Slacks, underthings, arm of divan."

"Are you saying Miss Blake was nude?"

"Wearing a--a blouse."

The listeners were too intent to snigger.

"Was Doherty also undressed?"

"Part--partly."

"Were they, to your knowledge, engaged in sexual intercourse?"

"They--yes, they were."

Short of breath, the courtroom sighed.

"What did you do, Mr. Judd?"

"Stepped back--got papers I wanted--left."

"They didn't learn of your presence, so far as you know?"

"No," he said, his breath still a burden to him. "No."

"You can be certain they didn't see you in the doorway--how?"

"Their eyes were closed."

"Your witness, Mr. Warner."

Warner remained by the defense table, standing, his hands pressing heavily on the back of his chair. Callista looked as though she had heard some dull distasteful gossip about a neighbor. "Mr. Judd, did you speak of this episode later to James Doherty--or to anyone?"

"To Jim, yes." Judd's face showed unhealthy mottling. "Following Monday. Only right, I thought--had to have it out."

"You told him what you had inadvertently seen?"

"Yes. Felt I owed him that. Said--you want what I said?"

"I think you might give the substance of the conversation."

"Well, I--said it wouldn't do. Said, what about Ann? Jim was perfectly frank, honest. Told me he realized--whole affair--terrible mistake, shouldn't've started. Said he was breaking it off. Of course I--only too glad to leave it at that, trust Jim's conscience, religious upbringing and so on. Least said, soonest--and so on."

"There was no question of dissolving your partnership with him?"

"Dissolving--heavens no! Never entered my head."

"You could find it in your heart to forgive him?"

"Not the way I'd put it, sir. You just can't condemn a man for--for one moral lapse. Could happen to any hotblooded young man."

"You are describing James Doherty as hotblooded?"

Callista Blake lowered her face in her hands. She was not weeping; her breathing was slow and regular. Perhaps, Judge Mann thought, she needed to shut away the voices, the faces, the nearness of her accusers. He noticed the newsmen scribbling busily a moment, and heard among the spectators a rustling, shifting, sighing, as if they were in some manner bound to her and could not move till her motion released them.

"I don't know. Jim's a good boy. Just sort of slipped."

"The woman tempted him?"

Hunter protested: "Counsel has strayed far from the matter of direct examination, and is trying to put words in the witness's mouth."

"Rephrase your question, Mr. Warner."

"I'll withdraw it." Warner was speaking gently, absently. "Mr. Judd, you were deeply concerned for James Doherty?"

"Of course. Terrible thing, specially if Ann--"

"Yes, you were concerned for Mrs. Doherty too, weren't you?"

"Of course."

"For anyone else?"

"What? Why, if you mean myself, I suppose--oh, I don't know."

"You weren't concerned for anyone else?"

"I don't get your drift."

"If you don't understand that question, I have no others."

"I--I--"

"I have no other questions, Mr. Judd."

Disturbed, not immediately certain of the cause, Judge Mann asked: "Do you wish to make a redirect examination, Mr. Hunter?"

"No, your Honor, not necessary. I--"

Judd's right hand groped toward his left arm and sagged away. He looked not exactly frightened, more as though shocked by some astonishing news. He said: "I wish I--" As if meekly, apologetically, he tumbled out of the witness chair in a slow sprawl.

II

The clock said half past one. Callista watched Judge Mann hurry into the courtroom, all business, dark pucker of a frown, the black robe too priestlike. It seemed to her that all present including herself were distorted by the magnifying power of ritual. As Father Bland, in the back row beside (_my late acquaintance_) James Mulhouse Doherty, would appear deceptively beyond life-size if he were wearing his magic vestments and saying a Mass.

"This Court is now in session." _Mr.-Delehanty-which-is-the-clerk._

_When did judges start wearing black robes, and why black? How long has the office of judge existed at all? How about the wig--(O the opportunity for mice!) and why did the American States do away with it?--unfair to bald American lawyers. Subject for a thesis--relation judiciary to priesthood--ecclesiastical courts--modern veneration for office of judge--has judiciary ever become really secular? In fact could it, ever? My ignorance_--

"Members of the jury," said Judge Mann, "your attention, please. I have just been talking on the telephone with Dr. Garcia at St. Michael's Hospital, where Mr. Judd was taken after his collapse this morning when he had finished testifying." (_Talking-to-Edith, compare ignorance to an unplowed field._) "It was a heart attack, as you probably realized, and the outlook for him may not be good. In Dr. Garcia's opinion, Mr. Judd's condition has probably been developing for quite a long time." (_The soil itself is ready, indifferent, to produce flowers, nice fat potatoes, or stinking weeds._) "The attack occurred, please remember, when his testimony was done. Legally the situation is this: Mr. Judd's collapse has no bearing on the case you must deal with. He had completed what he had to say; Mr. Hunter had announced he didn't intend to make a redirect examination. During this long noon recess I have talked with both counsel; neither side felt there would have been any occasion to recall Mr. Judd. While he testified, I think you'll agree, Mr. Judd was in full command of his faculties, so far as anyone can tell. Give his testimony the same weight, no more and no less, that you would if his breakdown had not happened; simply try to shut it out of your minds. To my certain knowledge, neither counsel was aware of the bad state of Mr. Judd's health. Both counsel believed him as well able to stand the emotional strain of giving testimony as any other witness. Mr. Judd undoubtedly believed this himself. Dr. Garcia tells me Mr. Judd had neglected medical attention for a long time and was unaware of his heart weakness. I charge you now, and will again: remember this thing happened outside of the trial."

The Judge was laboring, Callista understood, laboring too much perhaps, to defend Cecil Warner and through Warner herself, against the chill poison of unspoken words, illogical notions. If Nathaniel Judd died, no one would blame Mr. Hunter for summoning him, but many would recall Cecil Warner's words: "If you do not understand that question, I have no others." For certain minds it would be no strain to argue: _Judd died, therefore the Blake girl is guilty._

It could be true that Warner's words might have helped to topple old Judd, by making Judd sense for an instant some failure of charity and of perception in himself. Ill, embarrassed, he might not have rallied self-justifications quickly enough, so Warner's words might have caused a brief stab of conscience, enough to send him over the edge. _But if he dies the chief fault is mine. I am guilty. To live is to destroy--true or false? I am small; my only real quarrel with Hunter is that if he has his way I shall never grow. How stubborn the life that can't desire to die!_

Last August she had desired it, or thought she had, until a moment of that Saturday night, on the stairs, her mother weeping in a room left behind, her mind visited strangely by Victoria's grandchild the Funny Thing. She had begun to desire death earlier--in July, after Jim's letter, the only one he ever wrote. Stilted, timid; needless doubletalk; the awkwardness and misspelled words not endearing or funny but rather shocking, evidence of the blindness of her love.

_I will not say part of me died when I read that dismal thing. We die and regenerate with every breath. All that happened (I-would-say-to-Edith) was that my journey had taken me beyond the region where I met Jimmy and learned some aspects (not all) of a passion called love._

_Notice also (am-I-still-talking-to-Edith?) how the laughing-crying devil-angel that Jimmy woke up in me has not died, but rouses me even in the prison night, stinking bare-light-bulb night, starved for the pressure, the almost-anger, furious crescendo, meteoric release. Oh, in an enlightened society I could have been a splendid high-class whore!_

"You may call your next witness, Mr. Hunter."

"Sergeant Lloyd Rankin!"

Callista heard Cecil Warner's short involuntary sigh, felt his hostile stiffening and alertness. Detective Sergeant Lloyd Rankin of the Winchester Police came down the aisle and held up a flat hand for the oath, the slab-faced sober man. His gray hair under the cold light glinted like dull steel, his eyes a lighter gray but opaque, oyster gray. _Draw him as a bulldozer--Cecil might like it._ She ran her fingers softly over the wrinkled hand, lifted away the idle pencil and drew his scratch pad toward her.

A bulldozer has its own squat dignity. If it's directed to knock over some little house loved by generations, that's no fault of the dozer. The blade advances, the Diesel bellow swells to the roar of a caged hurricane. Old timbers--nobody wants them--crumble like dry cheese. And look!--the picture grew in swift lines and leaping shadows--look, a doll! Left behind maybe under the eaves years ago. It had tumbled into brief light in front of the caterpillar treads, which would of course move on. Too bad, but no time to stop.

She knew idly that the small brilliant drawing was good. Light lived in that doll, the rest a melancholy gray, a darkness. And turning the sketch face down, she wondered if she had done right in telling Cecil Warner of Sergeant Rankin's curious lapse on that afternoon last August when the world fell apart. In the Old Man's steady glare at Rankin--maybe he hadn't even felt her take the pencil--she glimpsed a blaze that would have suited the eyes of a male tiger about to drive another way from his mate and if possible gut him to ribbons. Her own half-welcomed excitement, private elemental anguish akin to the neural riot of approaching orgasm, was just as irrelevant, just as far from any notion of discovering truth--in a courtroom, of all places! For what after all did Rankin's moment of rutty brutality have to do with the truth or falsehood of her story? Accused of it--(_he will be!_)--Rankin would flatly deny it, the word of a respectable policeman against that of the Monkshood Girl.

Gravely, to the prosecutor, he was admitting twenty-two years of service with the Winchester Police, twelve of them with the Detective Division. An honest policeman, Rankin, an up-to-standard product of what must be a tight, hard school; a product chipped at the surfaces but wearing well. _And what is honesty?_

She supposed that for Lloyd Rankin it would mean being no more dishonest than a majority of his peers. It would mean: don't take _big_ bribes, and don't be an unpopular holy joe about the percentages from bookies and pimps and what-not: that's sort of like a tax, see? No compromise with major crime, but don't stick your neck too far out except in the obvious line of duty. There, in that clear line of duty, be ready to risk your life all the way and maybe lose it. Certainly give him that, she thought. He had all the earmarks of what is called a brave man, who could probably say with a bullet lodged in the bone: "It's the job." To Sergeant Rankin honesty would mean that obeying orders comes first; the top brass is paid to think, so when in doubt follow the rules. And Sergeant Rankin would believe (this she knew) that all criminals once caught are somewhat outside the human race, no longer protected by the common laws of charity and fair play. The professionals among them are The Enemy; the nonprofessionals, the one-shot wife-stabbers and other grown-up first offenders--his mind would balk at those, fretful and baffled: why couldn't they act like other people? Or perhaps he would be wedded to some one of the superficial formulas, substitutes for thought, derived from religion or popular psychology. Sensing no contradiction, Rankin would also believe in his heart that the world is more or less a God-damn jungle where every man (including this man Rankin) has his price.

"What is your present assignment, Sergeant?"

"Attached to Homicide Bureau, sir, the last four years."

"I ask you to recall the events of Monday, the 17th of last August. Did anything happen that day in the line of duty that had to do with the defendant Callista Blake?"

"Yes, sir."

"Give your own account of it, please."

Sergeant Rankin slipped on his reading glasses, appearing in that owlishness no less a cop, and consulted his notebook. "Late on the morning of August 17th of this year, Chief of Detectives Daniel Gage directed me to go to the apartment of a Miss Callista Blake at No. 21 Covent Street, this city, in response to a telephone call that Miss Blake had made to the local precinct station. The station had passed on the substance of her call to our headquarters, and Chief Gage relayed it to me. Miss Blake had told the desk sergeant she wished to give information to someone in authority concerning the death of a Mrs. James Doherty in Shanesville the previous night. She had said further that she was ill, and gave this as the reason why she did not wish to come to the police station herself. Chief Gage had communicated with the State Police, and he passed on to me what he learned from them about the death of this Mrs. Doherty, who had been found, apparently drowned, in a pond at Shanesville."

"All the persons involved--Miss Blake, Mrs. Doherty, and others you may have heard about later--were at that time unknown to you?"

"Yes, sir. Routine assignment to follow up information received."

"Go on, please."

"I reached Covent Street around noontime. I was in plain clothes of course. Miss Blake admitted me, and before looking at my identification remarked: 'Fast work! I've only been waiting an hour.' I don't know if this was sarcasm. There had been no unnecessary delay."

Wanting to soften the intensity of Cecil's glare, she whispered: "It was a noise to crack the silence. He stood in the door like a zombi, the dear man, so's to make me speak first." She won from the Old Man only a start, and a drowned look. He wasn't quite with her.

"Go on, Sergeant."

"I asked for her name, gave her mine, entered the apartment at her invitation after showing my credentials. I inquired how she came to know of Mrs. Doherty's death, and she said, first, that her stepfather had telephoned her about it, but then immediately, and without questioning from me, she said: 'Oh, I knew it, I knew it last night.'"

"Did you inquire what she meant by that?"

"Not right away. I first asked about her stepfather's call. I wanted to get the identification and relations of these people clear in my mind. She gave me the name Dr. Herbert Chalmers, said he had called her about eleven o'clock and told her Mrs. Doherty's body had been found in the pond. I engaged her in some general talk: who Dr. Chalmers was, and what was her connection with Shanesville, with Mrs. Doherty, how long she had lived there at Covent Street, things like that. She said she had called the precinct station right after her stepfather hung up--which checked, as to time. That first remark of hers--"

"I think we'll come back to that later. You say that in her call to the precinct station Miss Blake had said she was too ill to go there. Did she appear to be ill when you saw her?"

Rankin frowned. "I wouldn't say so. Dark under the eyes. I noticed a tremor in her hands. Nothing that couldn't be explained by--oh, nervousness perhaps."

"In that general talk, were her answers clear and satisfactory?"

"I learned nothing later to contradict them."

"I see. Well, did she then tell you what information it was she wished to give--what she had in mind when she called the precinct?"

"Yes, sir. When I inquired, she said Mrs. Doherty had come to the apartment the evening before. I asked what time; Miss Blake said Mrs. Doherty had come at about quarter to eight and left at eight-thirty."

"Did she give the occasion, the reason for Mrs. Doherty's visit?"

"Miss Blake said she had telephoned to Ann Doherty, asking her to come. I inquired the reason for this, what it was she wanted to see Mrs. Doherty about, and she refused to tell me."

"Did Miss Blake explain her refusal?"

"No, sir. Just said: 'I won't tell you that.' I didn't press it. I wanted to get on to other facts, facts she was willing to tell me."

"And she did give you other information?"

"She did, sir, freely enough."

"Just summarize it, please."

"She began by saying that since some time in July she had been under the influence of what she called a suicidal depression, that she had some poison in the apartment, and that she was afraid Mrs. Doherty might have drunk some of it by accident. Miss Blake said she had become ill during Mrs. Doherty's visit, had gone into her bedroom and shut the door--'to get away from her,' as Miss Blake put it--and that while she was there, in the bedroom, Mrs. Doherty must have poured a drink from the brandy bottle which contained the poison. Miss Blake said she had been still in the bedroom with the door shut--locked, in fact--when Mrs. Doherty left the apartment. Then, according to her account, Miss Blake came out, found the bottle had been moved, and became alarmed for Mrs. Doherty's safety." The slight drawl and falling cadence of Sergeant Rankin's voice was effective, Callista noted; good theater; something to admire as a work of art. "She got her car out of the garage and drove to Shanesville, to the Doherty house, found the Dohertys' car in the driveway, found Mrs. Doherty's handbag fallen in the path, house dark and door locked. Miss Blake said she then followed the path toward her mother's house, assuming that Ann Doherty must have gone that way, and presently discovered her, dead, in that pond. At that point, Miss Blake said, she panicked, and was also ill again, and--drove home. You understand, sir, I am merely summarizing, as you requested. Actually in that preliminary talk with her, a summary was all I got--with, as I later learned, some omissions. As soon as I had a general idea of the situation, I called Chief Gage, using Miss Blake's telephone. Chief Gage himself arrived at Covent Street at about ten of one, with a fingerprint man--Sergeant Zane I think it was--a photographer, and yourself, Mr. Hunter."

"Did you inquire, before others arrived, about this poison Miss Blake said she had?"

"Yes, sir. She said it was aconitine, and said she had prepared it a week before, by steeping monkshood roots in alcohol--brandy. I asked where she got the roots. From her mother's garden in Shanesville, she said. I asked whether she still had the stuff on hand. She said: 'Of course.' Mr. Hunter, maybe I ought to say at this point that up to then Miss Blake appeared to have no idea at all that she might be accused of anything. I don't pretend to understand it, but that was my distinct impression. Well, she took me out to the kitchenette, and showed me a half-full bottle labeled brandy, which she said contained the poison, and also an ordinary kitchen canister with some chopped-up mess that she told me was monkshood roots. She herself remarked that the brandy bottle probably had Mrs. Doherty's fingerprints. I took these items back to the living-room later, and from then on they weren't out of my sight until Chief Gage arrived and had them sent safe-hand to the Department's toxicologist Dr. Walter Ginsberg, after a fingerprint check. Miss Blake was very composed, I'd say sort of indifferent, about all this. When she had shown me the brandy bottle and the canister in the kitchenette, I asked her: 'Miss Blake, what did you have against this Mrs. Doherty?--you might as well tell me.' She didn't answer, just looked at me as if the question was--well, foolish or surprising. I said: 'Why did you do it?'" Sergeant Rankin turned over a leaf of his notebook. "She replied: 'That's how it is? I've told you the truth, but it's going to be like that?' I told her yes, of course it would be like that, and I asked her who she thought would believe the kind of story she'd given me. Miss Blake then said: 'Who knows what anyone believes?' And she asked: 'Are you going to arrest me?' I said that would be a decision of my superiors. Then I--told her to go back to the living-room and remain in my sight while I used her telephone. She did so."

Callista felt the Old Man lean close. He was muttering at his mouth-corner: "Is that when he--?"

She nodded. "He's deleted five rather long minutes. Why not let it go? My word against his, nothing much happened anyway, and it hasn't any bearing." Warner growled indecisively. "Partly my fault too--should've remembered my skirt might be transparent against that sun." Warner's hand tightened and fell slack. She noticed Rankin's oyster-gray glance flick her lightly and pass on, for the first time since he had taken the stand.

"Before Chief Gage and others arrived, did Miss Blake do or say anything else you remember as significant?"

"Well--one thing--I don't know how significant. There was a fancy aquarium thing in her living-room, with fish, tropical fish I guess. When I'd finished my call to Chief Gage--well--should I take up the Court's time with this?--I don't know if it's relevant at all."

Surprisingly to Callista, it was Judge Mann who said: "I think, having started, you may as well tell it, Sergeant. We can stop you if it's too far afield."

"Well--when I'd finished my call, Miss Blake said: 'I'm getting something from the kitchen, I suppose you want to come with me?' I did so, and stood by while she got a pitcher and emptied the ice-cube trays from the refrigerator into it. I inquired about it, and she said: 'Don't worry, it's just ice.' She carried the pitcher back to the living-room. She pointed out where an electric cord from the aquarium was plugged into a wall socket and asked me to disconnect it. I did so, mostly to humor her, saw no harm in it--I don't know anything about aquariums, nice hobby I guess. Anyhow before I knew what she intended she had poured the whole pitcher-full of ice cubes into the tank, and lifted out a gadget--a heating-coil in a glass cover--and rapped it real sharp against the leg of the table so that the glass broke and scattered over the carpet. I asked her what on earth she did that for, but she didn't explain the action--that is, she said the fish were beautiful, said it as if that explained something, but I don't know what she meant. Then she just stood by the aquarium watching them die. Two or three of them were dead almost right away, anyhow a matter of a few minutes. She pointed one of them out to me, a very small red fish, said it was a--a live-bearer I think she called it, and she gave me the scientific name of it too, but I don't remember that--platy-something. She said that one was a female ready to give birth. I'd thought all fish laid eggs, but seems not. I asked her again what she wanted to go and do a thing like that for. She said: 'They were beautiful and I loved them. Now watch them die.'"

Again it was Judge Mann who asked: "Those were her exact words?"

"Yes, your Honor. I asked her then if she took pleasure from killing beautiful things, and she looked at me--rather strangely, I must say--and said: 'No, Sergeant, this is the only time I ever killed anything beautiful, or anything I loved.' I don't know why a person would do a thing like that."

Tight-voiced, dubious, like a man groping through uncertain country, Judge Mann asked: "Was she, in your opinion, overexcited--exalted--anything like that, Sergeant?"

Hunter just watched. Callista thought: _Hunter isn't liking this._

Sergeant Rankin's voice echoed something of Judge Mann's perplexity; a true echo probably, for Callista sensed that Sergeant Rankin had never until this moment entertained the notion that the Monkshood Girl might be of unsound mind. And the notion might be, to Sergeant Rankin, interesting, without regard to the tender feelings of the District Attorney's office. For an accusation of physical coercion and threat of rape would be far less convincing from a psychopath. Cecil would be noticing the Sergeant's tentative nibbling at the idea. Cecil might be wishing that the Judge would make more inquiry along that line--for to Cecil, she knew, an insanity defense might still be a sort of last-ditch possibility in spite of her total refusal to go along with it. While she herself rather hoped the little man in the too priestlike gown would shut up and mind his own business. _What's it to him? Perhaps it will be to him, and not to Cecil whom I love, that I'll find the courage to say: I am guilty._

Sergeant Rankin picked his way among words like a man stepping from hummock to hummock through a marsh. "I would say, your Honor, that there was, maybe, something like that about her--general behavior. But--a vague sort of thing--I don't know if I should express an opinion, just a--a layman's opinion anyhow--"

"Well," said the Judge crisply, "did Miss Blake become abusive, or scream, cry, talk irrationally or too loud or too fast, anything like that?"

"No, your Honor, none of those things, not at all."

"Did she seem confused, inattentive to what you said or unable to understand it?"

"No, your Honor. Very cool and self-possessed, really. I had--if I might put it this way--I had an impression that she was deliberately talking over my head--that I didn't understand some of the things she said because I wasn't meant to."

"Do you mean her answers were unresponsive, unconnected with the questions you asked?"

"No, not quite that, your Honor. Well, I recall one thing, after she broke the aquarium heater and we exchanged those remarks about--about killing beautiful things. I said to her: 'Look, Miss Blake, if they decide to arrest you, surely you've got some friend who would have looked after that aquarium for you while you're away.' Now it's my recollection that I said that in a perfectly friendly, kindly way--I certainly had no wish to make things hard for her--but Miss Blake said: 'A spring morning can't be warmed up in the oven.' Well, I wouldn't know whether a head--whether a psychiatrist would call that an irrational reply or not. I just didn't think it made much sense."

"I see. Go on, Mr. Hunter."

"Did anything else significant happen before Chief Gage arrived?"

"I think not, sir. Nothing I remember. I didn't think I was getting anywhere trying to talk with her, so for the last five or ten minutes we just sat there waiting for the others to come."

"Yeah," Callista said under her breath, "we just sat there." She leaned a little against Cecil's shoulder, weary, suddenly desiring sleep above all things, yet touched and curiously disturbed by the Old Man's harmless, rather pleasant smell of shaving lotion, soap, tobacco. Drowsily she thought: _He's really nothing like my father._

"What happened, in your presence, after Chief Gage and the others arrived at Miss Blake's apartment?"

"Well, Miss Blake was briefly questioned by Chief Gage and yourself. It covered the same things I'd talked about with her. She was asked by Chief Gage about a photograph and a couple of letters that I found in a desk in her bedroom."

"She was not at that time under arrest, was she?"

"No, sir, she was not. I recall that Chief Gage quite formally asked her permission to look around the apartment, and she gave it."

"Please describe those items, the photograph and the letters."

"The photograph was a snapshot of a man in swimming trunks, taken at some beach or other, and the name 'Jimmy' was written on the back--just the name, nothing else. One of the letters, dated July 5, 1959, was signed 'J', and Miss Blake, when shown it, identified it as one written to her by Mr. James Doherty of Shanesville. The other one, bearing no date and not signed--in fact not finished--was identified by Miss Blake as one that she had started to write to Mr. Doherty, but had never mailed."

"Was Miss Blake questioned about those letters, there at her apartment?"

"Not much then, sir. She identified Mr. Doherty as the husband of the Mrs. Doherty who had been found dead in Shanesville. Chief Gage asked her to explain the relation between herself and Mr. Doherty, and she said without any show of emotion--with a shrug, as a matter of fact--she said: 'Oh, he was my sweetheart for a little while, a summertime amusement.'"

She saw T. J. Hunter, relaxed and thoughtful, walk to the prosecution's table and spend a weary time standing there, brooding at the small papers he had taken up. Callista closed her eyes. "If it please the Court, I will offer these two letters and photograph for admission in evidence, but, if they are accepted, I will have the letters read to the jury somewhat later, to make a more orderly presentation. For the present I merely wish to establish their identification by Sergeant Rankin."

The deep voice by her shoulder remarked: "I will ask to see them." _Do you have to go over there, Cecil?_ Then Callista was aware of a small but unaccountable lapse of time, for Cecil was already by the prosecution's table glaring morosely at little scraps of paper, his bushed eyebrows in a clench, while T. J. Hunter stood by politely, hands in his pockets. Had she fallen asleep sitting up? Was it possible for an accused witch to do that in a court of law? _Oh, likely had something to attend to, and took off on my broomstick--well, sure, a mission, three times around the Shanesville house casting a spell to curdle Cousin Maud's plum jam, and high time too--it merely slipped my mind--how'd I manage without a cat?_ She saw the Old Man's shoulder sag and stiffen. It was cut and dried, he had told her: the letters would go in, mostly because he hoped to gain more than lose by them, when there was a chance for the defense to interpret them. This present show of examining them was what he called legal window-dressing. She saw him make some quick _sotto voce_ comment, his face savagely disgusted, an aside that no one but T. J. Hunter could hear. Hunter flushed all the way up his bald forehead; the flush passed, leaving no sign of anger. Then Cecil spoke in his courtroom voice, smoothly, a tone of indifference close to contempt: "The defense will not protest the admission of these documents."

_How could I have slept?_ Cecil was returning. _Apparently no one noticed--a minor accomplishment of necromancy--I just toss these things off, you know._ Some mumbling and talking over yonder, as she felt the return of Cecil's warmth, and took hold of his hand, though he was really nothing like her father. Yes, Rankin, identifying the silly things. _Poor Jim, spelled "relinquish" r-e-l-i-n-q-u-e-s-h. E for effort._ "Cecil, what did you say to the rising young lawyer that turned him pink?"

He looked at her doubtfully, not smiling. "I said the prosecution must be running out of keyholes."

"Maybe you touched a childhood trauma."

"His childhood be damned," the Old Man grumbled. "He's still a snotnose pulling the wings off flies, as a profession."

"I decline to be compared to a house-fly."

"Shut up, dear. I've got to listen again."

"Sergeant, after Miss Blake's admission that James Doherty had been her lover, was she questioned any further, there at her apartment?"

"No, sir. Chief Gage informed her that she would be detained for questioning. She made no protest. Accompanied by yourself, Mr. Hunter, I took her in a police car direct to Mr. Lamson's office, in this building."

"Was she questioned there, in your presence?"

"Yes, sir, mainly by Mr. Lamson. My recollection is that the others present were yourself, Chief Gage, Miss Wallingford--that's Mr. Lamson's secretary--who made a stenographic record of the interrogation, and Sergeant Shields of the State Police, who was present only a part of the time, a few minutes."

"Did Miss Blake sign anything during that interview at Mr. Lamson's office, while you were present?"

"She did, sir. The stenographic record of the interrogation was typed by Miss Wallingford. Miss Blake then read it, and signed it--signed the written statement that the answers given by her and recorded in the transcript were true to the best of her knowledge and belief. Her signature was witnessed by Mr. Lamson and yourself, and Mr. Lamson requested me to read and initial the pages of the typescript, which I did."

"If it please the Court--" and Cecil was gone again, looming over yonder, examining the pages, large ones this time, impressive legal size. More window-dressing. But discussion was longer; she grew inattentive in her drowsiness. She heard Hunter remark that the transcript would be read after cross-examination of Sergeant Rankin--if, said the bald polite man with the shovel chin, Mr. Warner elected to cross-examine. Cecil grunted. A side-bar huddle followed that. Some of the time she knew her eyelids had drooped, hiding her in a murmurous partial darkness; some of the time she was watching, with an abstract friendliness and faraway approval, the thoughtful and still puzzled features of Judge Terence Mann. _I can't explain it either, Judge. According to my own biased notions, I'm not mad, at least no more than my old buddy Hamlet, who also had a mother. Gets complicated there, because Hamlet was decidedly male, I think, any side up, while I'm every inch a wench. Ask Rankin. You see_--

It disturbed her, to reflect how little any of those present would ever know about her. They looked at her; anyway their eyes did. In a few days they would hear her talk from that dizzy isolation of the witness stand; anyway their ears would register certain sounds. Already through the testimony their mental vision (imperfect, cloudy, variously preoccupied) had watched her squeaking grass-blades with the Wayne kids, snapping at poor Cousin Maud on the front porch. They had seen her (through the fogs and excitements of their own scrambled sexual histories) caught in that slow frenzy--(_wearing a blouse_)--on the divan in Jim's office, under the glazed smirk of an "art"-calendar nude. _Who were you then, Callista?--what were you then?_ They had seen her, guilty or innocent, standing by black water, under hemlocks, under a hazy moon.

But they did not know her.

They could not communicate with the inner spectator-participator. It had needed nineteen years to create the Monkshood Girl, a short time, yet to the jurors, the Judge, Cecil, even to Edith, the nineteen years amounted to an infinite complexity never to be explored. They could not watch the golden kitten Bonnie, nor Aunt Cora. They could not learn of the young discoveries: language, music; endless expansion of the visible world as her hand acquired certain powers of dealing with line and color and mass or began to acquire it. They had no vision for the dreams of her sleep, or the waking dreams.

Ann Doherty, inarticulate Jim, mysteries quite as obscure. _What do you think you know about Ann, gentlemen? Cute, blonde, and married: isn't that about as far as you go?_

_We are not what you see, we people who look at you out of clever photographs in the paper at your breakfast tables. When you burn the image you have created you burn the true self also, but you cannot know that self. I am here with you, and captured, and maybe you ought to fear me as you do, but I am not what you suppose._

III

He met the flat patient stare of Sergeant Lloyd Rankin, which indicated a readiness like that of a dog who will not attack unless provoked. Say a Boxer: Rankin was built like that, and would fight in a Boxer's style, with single-minded courage closely akin to stupidity.

He saw T. J. Hunter seated at the prosecution's table and turned partly away from the witness chair, making a show of rereading that transcript of Callista's ordeal. T.J. would be listening to the cross-examination, and sharply; but Cecil Warner had to admit that the show of bored indifference was quite as expert as anything he could have managed himself. This silence had lasted long enough, or too long; he heard fidgeting in the back rows; he could not spend any more time gloomily viewing Rankin's Boxer jaws.

"Sergeant Rankin, when Miss Blake realized she would be under suspicion, you asked her--I think these were your words--you asked her who she thought would believe a story like hers. Correct?--that's your recollection of what you said?"

"Yes, sir, I think I put it that way."

"Meaning, I suppose, that you didn't believe her story yourself?"

"No, sir--I mean no, I didn't believe it."

"Did you suggest that she ought to change her story?"

"Oh, I told her--more than once, I guess--that she ought to tell the truth about it, that she'd get a better break if she did."

"A better break. Those were your words, 'a better break'?"

He noticed a dim flush on Rankin's heavy cheeks, some flicker of doubt or uneasiness in chilly gray eyes. Rankin could have no way of knowing how much Callista might have told. "Yes, I think that was how I put it, Mr. Warner. She seemed to be expecting me to believe it, and--"

"But she replied: 'Who knows what anyone believes?'"

"Yes."

"And asked then if you were going to arrest her?"

"She did, and I told her that would be up to my superiors, not me."

"This conversation took place in the kitchenette, after she had taken you out there and shown you the brandy bottle, and volunteered her account which you preferred not to believe?"

"It wasn't a case of preference, Mr. Warner. I--"

"All right, never mind that. The conversation took place in the kitchenette?"

"Yes."

"And you told her to go back to the living-room, and she did so?"

"Yes."

"She went ahead of you?"

"Ahead of me?"

"My words are plain, aren't they?" _Give him no time--Boxer hates to be pushed._ "She stepped out of the kitchenette and walked ahead of you down that little hallway toward the living-room, did she not?"

"Really I don't remember. I suppose--"

"Don't _remember_! In direct examination you showed an excellent memory for details. Let me just check your memory a little. What way does the front of that apartment house face, 21 Covent Street? East?"

"Why--yes, east, or south-east anyway."

"Was it a bright day, August 17th?"

"Yes, bright sunny day."

"Hot?"

"Very hot."

"Sunlight in the living-room windows, was there? Remember?"

"Yes."

"In the hallway?"

"I guess so."

"Good memory. Let me check it just a little more. What was Miss Blake wearing that day?"

"A--oh, just a dress, I don't know what a dressmaker would call it."

"Well--color?"

"White."

"Good. A simple white dress. Now look, Sergeant, I think you can remember whether she went ahead of you into the living-room. I'll help you out--you wouldn't have left her alone with that brandy bottle when you'd as good as told her she was under suspicion, would you?"

"Oh--well, that. Yes, if it matters, I remember she went first."

"Did you again tell her she ought to change her story?"

"I may have."

"Sergeant, I point out to you again, your memory under direct examination was excellent. You referred to your notebook, you repeated several remarks verbatim--to some of which the defense might have justifiably objected, if I had seen fit. Now--did you tell her a second time that she would get a better break if she changed this story which you say you didn't believe? Did you, Sergeant?"

"Yes, it's my recollection that I did."

"Did you suggest any other thing she might do that would, in your words, give her a better break?"

"Any other--I don't know what you mean."

"Then let me help your memory again. This conversation, when you repeated that she ought to change her story--did this conversation take place while you were going back to the living-room?"

"I--oh, I guess so."

"I'm asking for testimony, not guesswork. Did it, or not?"

"Yes."

"What did Miss Blake say?"

"It's my recollection that she--I don't think she said anything."

"She didn't? You remember how she _looked_, don't you?"

"Of course."

"Of course. Simple white dress, you said--correct?"

"Yes."

"Walking down the hall, between you and the sunlight in the living-room. Didn't she say, or rather cry out: 'Take your ugly hands off me, you fool!'--have you forgotten that?"

He heard Hunter jump up, and waited motionless for the angry blast: "Objection! This is outrageous. There has been nothing--"

Judge Terence Mann said: "There has been a good deal." Warner looked up quickly then; if his astonishment showed for a second, probably no one but Terence saw it. There was time to wonder how much of a surprise it was to T.J.--complete, very likely. And Terence Mann himself looked astonished at the swiftness and sharpness of his own words. "If there is any suspicion that a police officer has acted in that manner toward the defendant, the defense is well within its rights to pursue this line of questioning. The objection is overruled." _But Terry must know we can't prove it._ "Answer the question, Sergeant."

Staring at the Judge, T. J. Hunter said slowly: "Exception."

"Answer the question, Sergeant Rankin."

Rankin too had gone quiet, no visible motion in him except a rhythmic twitch at the corners of his Boxer jaws. "Will you repeat the question, Counselor?"

"I will. I ask whether Callista Blake said to you: 'Take your ugly hands off me, you fool!'"

"She did not."

"I quote to you these words: 'Look, I can give you a lot of breaks if you'll put out.' Did you say that to Callista Blake?"

"Objection."

"Overruled."

"I did not."

"You have no recollection of that?"

"It didn't happen, that's all. I never touched her."

"No? You didn't, a few minutes later, strike her across the face with the flat of your hand?"

"Objection!"

"Overruled."

"I certainly did not. The whole thing is imaginary."

"Did Callista Blake, while you had hold of her, tell you that she was ill, that she had had a miscarriage the night before?"

"Objection!"

"Overruled." _So Terry sticks his own neck way out, his own feelings involved, his judgment slipping, and where does that take us?_

"Exception."

"She did not tell me that, Counselor. She had no occasion to tell me that. I say again, the whole thing is imaginary. I know my duties, and my position as a police officer. Nothing like that happened, and if the defendant says it did, she is lying." Except for that twitch, and the high tension of his blocky hands gripping the witness chair, nothing in Rankin's solid front suggested he might himself be lying.

"You say the whole thing is imaginary. Really! Is it imaginary, just a bad dream cooked up by the defense--what do you take us for, Sergeant?--is it imaginary that you shoved Callista Blake down on the couch in the living-room, that she then told you she was ill, that in spite of that you went on trying to force her, that you exposed yourself, that she then said a certain thing which frightened you, so that you let her go, after first striking her across the face with the flat of your hand?"

"Objection of course. Whole question improper and fantastic."

"Overruled."

_Terry, I don't know_--

"Exception."

"Nothing like that happened. I deny it absolutely."

"In that view of it, I won't question you further about this, or anything else, I think, since the only thing of service to my client is the truth. I dare say, in redirect examination, you'll have opportunity to repeat your virtuous denials--"

"That's outrageous."

Warner swung around. "Something else is outrageous--"

"Mr. Warner!" But that was Terry, and he must listen. "We cannot have this. Please control yourself."

"I am sorry, your Honor. My apologies to the Court, and to Mr. Hunter--who, I am sure, knew nothing about any improper conduct on the part of his witness. That's all."

Warner sat down, with a sudden breaking out of sweat on his face, a dizziness and blurring of vision. Callista's hand slipped over his, easing his fingers out of their involuntary clench. She was repeating his name softly: "Cecil--Cecil--are you all right?"

"Yes." He covered his mouth to speak to her. "I couldn't break him. I thought I could break the bastard."

"Never mind. Relax. You bent him, but good."

"Not enough. You'll have to take the stand, maybe."

"But I must anyway. Relax."

_Concerned for me._ He noticed the courtroom was quiet, Hunter delaying. Judge Mann's gaze was on him too, worried and speculative. _Do they think I'm going to fold like Judd? Judd--I said to that man Judd: 'If you do not understand that question--'_ He wiped his forehead. Maybe Callista had helped him get that handkerchief out of his pocket. He would not fold. Let them take their eyes off him. _Let them get on with it._

Hunter was getting on with it--neutrally it seemed. "Sergeant Rankin, I'll merely ask you: is there any foundation in fact, anything at all, to support this suggestion of misconduct on your part with the defendant Callista Blake?"

"None whatever, sir. None whatever."

Hunter was pausing another long time. Warner now helplessly understood that he was giving Rankin time to think, time for the man's rather slow wits to come up with the obvious countercharge. Hunter said at last: "In summary, then, you simply questioned Miss Blake about the story she had told you, you took charge of the brandy bottle and so on, you called Chief Gage, and then there was this episode of the fish-tank--when Miss Blake, you say, was composed, sort of philosophical and all that, hardly the way a girl would act, I guess, if she'd just been threatened and pushed around. That's a correct summary?"

"Yes, sir, I think that about sums it up. Well--" It was comic enough, to observe the slow grimace as Rankin caught on to what Hunter would like him to say.

Hunter asked mildly: "Something you wish to add?"

"Well--I guess not. Of course I'm very much surprised that the defense should see fit to make a charge like that against me, but there seems to be no way of proving anything--Miss Blake's word against mine--and if I say anything about--about her own conduct in that respect, it's the same situation, so I would rather ignore it, let it go."

Warner sickened inwardly with self-blame. _I underestimated the brains in the son of a bitch_--no, hardly even that, for a cub lawyer should have seen it coming, the obvious countercharge by innuendo. Rankin had done it cleverly, though; he could hardly have said anything better calculated to make Callista seem a whore. _I should sell apples on a streetcorner._

A sober workman driving in finishing nails, T. J. Hunter said: "I understand your reluctance, Sergeant, and I think we might as well leave it at that. Recross, Mr. Warner?"

Cecil Warner remembered how, long ago, on childhood occasions when he had been goaded into fighting, he had often been struck by a crying spell in the midst of battle. It had become a sort of distinction: "_Cecil's all right till he goes to bawling--then watch out!_" It would not happen now. But he knew his voice was shouting, too loudly, and cracking absurdly in the shout: "Are you being humorous, Mr. District Attorney? I am concerned with establishing the truth, and questioning that man will not serve any such purpose."

Judge Mann started to speak but checked himself, watching Sergeant Rankin step down and stride away. _Terry will not look at me. Take my hand, Callista._ Hardly wondering at the coincidence, he felt the cool pressure of her fingers renewed. _I shall not survive the conclusion, win or lose, but that hardly matters, Old Man_--

"If it please the Court, the prosecution is ready to read the transcript of the interrogation of Callista Blake on August 17th, which has been admitted in evidence and which I have here."

Judge Mann said drily: "It will be read by the clerk of court."

Something accomplished anyway, in that side-bar huddle before Rankin's cross-examination: the transcript would not be read with baritone sound effects. Hunter passed the pages to Mr. Delehanty with good enough grace, having no choice. To the hearers, Warner knew, much of it would be dull, a repetition of what had already been said. A welcome dullness, allowing time to rest. Mr. Delehanty would begin smartly, then fall to droning as the question-and-answer rhythm caught hold of him. The duller the better. _Keep my hand, Callista._

Cecil Warner drifted into bewilderment, a sense that at some point there had been an illogical reversal of roles. Must he draw on the strength of this girl who in a few months might be butchered by the State, as if there remained in him no power at all, not even the power of wisdom? As if it were natural, and right, that in her danger and misery, in her green youth too, it should be Callista who possessed a power to heal and save? _The defense never rests, but_--

_Can anyone save another? Maybe, with good fortune._

_Or help another? The heart says yes. Keep my hand, Callista._

He came alert with a frightened start. Mr. Delehanty's voice had already sagged into a singsong monotony, and might have been burbling on a long time.

QUESTION (by Mr. Lamson): Can anyone support your statement that you were experiencing what you call a suicidal depression for a month or more, from early July to the middle of August?

ANSWER: No, I never spoke of it to anyone.

_Why not to me? I might have_--

Near his eyes, Callista's face took on a momentary immensity, like a great image on a softly brilliant screen. She must have had her teeth clamped a while on her underlip. It looked swollen as though from a bout of love.

QUESTION: Was anyone aware of your taking those monkshood roots?

ANSWER: No one.

QUESTION: Not even James Doherty?

ANSWER: I have had no communication with James Doherty since receiving that letter of his you took from my desk. In that time I've seen him only once--at the picnic when I got the monkshood. I didn't talk with him then, he did not talk with me, he knew nothing of what I was doing.

"You'll come to see me tonight, Cecil?"

"Yes."

"Something I must tell you."

"What, dear?"

"Not now. Tonight."

QUESTION: You had these roots, this poison, a week ago Friday. What about the suicidal depression?--change your mind?

ANSWER: I don't know how the mind works.

QUESTION: Now, Miss Blake! Anybody knows if he's changed his mind.

ANSWER: Does he?

QUESTION: All right. I can assume you gave up the notion of suicide?

ANSWER: Not a notion. An uncompleted decision, perhaps. Which did lose its importance after a while.

QUESTION: Did you, or you and James Doherty acting together, intend that poison for Mrs. Doherty?

ANSWER: Must I answer that again? James Doherty knew nothing about any poison, or my possession of it. I intended it only for myself.

QUESTION: But kept it there more than a week, where I suppose anyone might have stumbled on it?

ANSWER: Not exactly. Back of a shelf. Nobody visiting me was likely to go get a drink from a back shelf without invitation.

QUESTION: But you say that's just what Mrs. Doherty did.

ANSWER: Why, I think her idea was to get the drink for me. Then I guess she understood I'd locked myself into the bedroom. With the drink in her hand, and upset by what I'd been saying, I suppose she just tossed it off, maybe not even knowing she did. It would be natural.

QUESTION: Didn't she knock? Call to you? Try the door?

ANSWER: I don't know, Mr. Lamson.

QUESTION: Don't know. I can't accept that.

ANSWER: It's the truth, and all I can say. Partial amnesia.

QUESTION: Do you have any idea how many professional criminals try that amnesia thing? Everything went black--yeah. You're not a professional criminal, you're a very intelligent girl. How do you think that amnesia stuff is going to sound in court?

ANSWER: Bad.

QUESTION: Well? Don't you care?

ANSWER: I can't invent for you. I don't know. I can't remember.

QUESTION: All right. Mrs. Doherty was upset by what you'd been saying. What had you been saying?

ANSWER: I told her about my affair with her husband.

QUESTION: Just like that?

ANSWER: Yes. I think I was very stupid. I hoped to persuade her to allow a separation. I knew her church doesn't allow divorce, but I thought she might permit us that much. I wanted my baby to have a father, married or not. It's bad, trying to grow up without a father. Mine died when I was seven. I wanted mine to have a father.

QUESTION: Yes, that was in the letter you wrote him.

ANSWER: Wrote but never mailed. I should have destroyed it.

QUESTION: Why didn't you mail it?

ANSWER: I'm not sure I can explain that. An obsession is a strange thing, and so is suicidal depression--and so's pregnancy. You don't just sit quiet and work out the mathematics. Your mind shifts and struggles like a thing in a web, tries to decide what matters most. The answers don't always stay the same. The day after I started that letter, I didn't go on with it because then I didn't even want Jimmy to know I was pregnant. I saw it wouldn't work out even if he were entirely free. Too different. We couldn't possibly have lived together. Then later I was trying again to think it might work--and so on.

QUESTION: Go on, please.

ANSWER: How? Mr. Lamson, I know ten million more things about myself than you ever could, but you're asking me to explain things that even I don't know. How can I? Well, the night before Ann came to see me, Saturday, I had a time when everything looked possible. I wanted to have the baby, I was almost happy, I wasn't thinking of suicide--I even forgot about that poison. Next day, Sunday, I was imagining again that Ann might permit a separation so that he could be with me. Crazy, but that's how I had it lined up that day, that's why I telephoned her, that's how it looked right up until I began to talk with her. Then--card-house fell down.

QUESTION: You told her you were pregnant?

ANSWER: No, I didn't even get that far. I saw it was no use, waste of time. We had not enough words in common.

QUESTION: Not enough words?

ANSWER: Oh--oh--whatever I said meant something else in her mind, the way everything I say now means something else to you, heaven knows what. No such thing as a common language. We all talk in the dark. If a bit of light breaks we're frightened and try to blot it out.

QUESTION: I don't follow you.

ANSWER: Don't try. I'm not going your way.

QUESTION: This isn't an occasion for humor, is it?

ANSWER: People will tell you I laugh at the damnedest things.

QUESTION: If you didn't say you were pregnant, how much did you say?

ANSWER: All she understood was that we'd had an affair.

QUESTION: Did you quarrel?

ANSWER: No.

QUESTION: She wasn't angry?

ANSWER: No, very forgiving. That's when I was sick to my stomach.

QUESTION: Really, Miss Blake! Are you saying--

ANSWER: I don't know what I'm saying any more.

QUESTION: Yes, I realize you're having a bad time. I'm not intentionally cruel, it's merely my job to enforce the laws of this community. Naturally your pregnancy entitles you to every consideration, but--

ANSWER: Mr. Lamson, didn't I say I _was_ pregnant? I had a miscarriage last night.

QUESTION: Oh. I'm sorry, I don't think you did tell us that. When did it happen?

ANSWER: Out there, after I'd found her in the pond.

QUESTION: A result of shock, or--exertion?

ANSWER: Shock maybe. Is this the fourth time I've told you I didn't push her in the water? I found her, I knew she was dead, I came away.

QUESTION: The miscarriage--I'm sorry, but I must ask--

ANSWER: Why, frankly, Mr. Lamson, it hurts.

QUESTION: You know very well that's not what I meant. Where exactly were you when it happened?

ANSWER: First pain, there by the pond. I went back to my car because I thought I might be able to drive home somehow--

QUESTION: You mean to your mother's house?

ANSWER: I do not, I mean my apartment. But it was getting worse, and at the junction I did turn that way on Walton, because I remembered the woods across the road. I left the car by the pines, and got over there, into the woods. It was over pretty soon.

QUESTION: You must have a good deal of courage, Miss Blake.

ANSWER: Enough, I hope.

QUESTION: I hope so too. By the way, Miss Blake, you might glance at this folder, if you will.

"That's where he flashed the morgue pictures at you, Cal?"

"Uh-huh. I was a--what's the term?--a cool customer. Oh yes--he's reading my intelligent comments now. Not bad for a beginner, don't you think? Like Lizzie Borden."

"Hush, dear."

"Well, Lizzie was a beginner too. What's more she had to operate on a breakfast of mutton broth."

Cecil Warner could wonder then whether it had been Callista's wry and thorny humor that saved her during the moments last August--there must have been such moments--when she had drawn that dark bottle forward on the shelf and perhaps set out a single glass.

IV

As Joe Bass emptied the ash tray and made gentle needless motions with a dustrag at the bookshelves, Judge Terence Mann glanced at the handful of doodle scraps he had taken out of their temporary shelter in the minute book at the close of the day. None of them pleased him now, except possibly his sketch of the fingerprint technician Sergeant Zane scratching the lens he wore in place of a head. Drawing the toxicologist Dr. Ginsberg with his smooth face modified into a chemical retort had not turned out well. There was no comedy in solemn Dr. Ginsberg, unless it might be in his very self-conscious aloofness, his volunteered declaration on the stand that he never listened to anything about a criminal case except the facts immediately pertinent to his specialty. He had said in effect: "_That_ for your emotional involvements!"--but it was a valid attitude if you happened to be Dr. Ginsberg, and not very funny.

"Did you stick it out, Joe?"

"No, I wanted to tidy up in here, so I slipped out after Mr. Delehanty finished reading that statement. Did I miss anything important?"

"Not much. Fingerprints. Mrs. Doherty's and Callista Blake's on the brandy bottle. It should even help the defense slightly, showing that Mrs. Doherty handled the bottle and that no attempt was made to wipe it or dispose of it. Callista Blake had all night and next morning to get rid of anything incriminating, if she'd been so minded. Then we had Dr. Ginsberg. Nothing new, he just made it official. Four milligrams of aconitine in the organs he studied, and they say one milligram is enough to kill. Wound up the day with Mr. Lamson; he testified to receiving those three other letters of Miss Blake's, direct from James Doherty. It seems Doherty simply walked in and dumped them on Lamson's desk, following the advice of his priest. I hadn't known it was quite like that. Lamson seemed to imply it was an example of civic virtue. No comment, Joe. I'm unhappy. Well, Lamson identified the letters, and they went in without protest, but won't be read till tomorrow, which will wind up for the State, I guess. Defense ought to open tomorrow afternoon, or sooner. Oh--you would have liked this. When Mr. Hunter asked if Mr. Warner wanted to cross-examine Lamson, the Old Man said: 'I believe I will decline the privilege.' But nobody laughed."

"Do you think Mr. Hunter will put James Doherty on the stand?"

"No. Not needed, and too likely to blow up in his face. Doherty couldn't testify to anything but the affair, so far as I know, and that's been proved and admitted."

"I was watching Mr. Doherty a little this afternoon, Judge. One of his knuckles is bloody, from biting it."

"Another casualty of the case. Nobody will be the same after it, not even you and I."

"I, Judge? I'm too old to change much. I already knew the world's full of sadness according to where you stand."

"I suppose I knew it too," said Judge Mann, and watched Joe's small crinkled hands spread out on the other side of the desk resting on the fingertips, and felt not only uncertain but immature. _Bring out the inner voices._

_I should have taken another road, Mr. Brooks--other roads. I should have married, maybe._

_Where does anyone find the vanity to become a judge? No, that's not it. I have vanity enough, or too much. But in me, I suppose other forces balance the native vanity, cancel it out. There was never anything in Judge Cleever to make him doubt he's God's own right hand man._

Exercising a privilege of age and kindness, Joe said softly: "Relax, boy."

"Yes, when it's over, I must do that. Do we ever know where we're going?"

"Not to say know, maybe. Just the present road, and good or bad guesswork."

"And crossroads?"

"Same thing, Judge. You try to make the right guess, with whatever good judgment you've got at the time. I've always been alone at my crossroads--I guess everyone is. Or if there was a crowd, I didn't see how they could know where I was going. I was better off trying to puzzle out the signposts myself."

6

Nox est perpetua una dormienda.

CATULLUS

I

"In the prison house are many mansions. This one looks very nice--thank the good Sheriff for me, for us, Cecil. Is it wired for sound?"

"No, dear, it's just an office. Sheriff's working late down the hall--records room--and said we could have this. Nobody'll bother us."

"May I sit at the desk and judge humanity?"

"Why not?"

"Or I'll be a lady of the Abbey of Theleme, where the law was 'Do what thou wilt.' No--can't have anything like that going on in the Sheriff's own office. And still--flowers on the desk?"

"The explanation is anticlimax. Sheriff's good-looking, has a devoted secretary, her brother-in-law runs a florist's shop."

"Like that. Never mind, I hereby make-believe the flowers are for me, the blood-red roses and the little white ones, sweet hot-house children. Not quite real, are they?--no black-spot, no bitten leaves, sheltered children, I guess they don't understand. But I'll make-believe. Am I occasionally beautiful, Cecil?"

"To me, always."

"I've always loved words, you know. It amounts to a fault. I can't make them do as I wish. I could never write. I don't know enough about people, maybe never shall. But I know the power of words. You say I'm beautiful to you, and that makes me so, I believe it, the words shut away everything foreign to the Abbey of Theleme--no, that's not where we are. But isn't it strange what words can do? Comfort and terrify, heal and kill. Make out of nothing, something, and another word can send the something back to a nothing. It was my father's gift, that love of words. I was reading precociously at least a year before he died. Mother (who is definitely literate and past president of the local PTA, no kidding) felt it wasn't quite right at such an age."

"What's that paper? Are you tearing it?"

"Just a blank sheet the good Sheriff left on his desk. I hope he won't miss it. Not tearing, love, building. It's my crown, Cecil. I need a pin. Is that a pin in your lapel?"

"Yes--here."

"Thanks. That'll do it. Ouch! Well, nothing created without pain. How does it look?"

"Royal."

"Does it suit my complexion?"

"White and ivory--yes, not bad."

"Is it all right for a queen to suck a pin-pricked finger?"

"Rank has its privileges."

"Good. So, not a lady of Theleme but a mere queen, I'll do my best while I have authority. This object shaped like a ruler is my scepter, and this apparent ink-bottle--no, if rank has its privileges, we'll omit the orb and you give me a cigarette. You may light it for me, and remember you have the right at any time to be seated in my presence. My lord, do you have any defense to set forth in favor of this mewling monster, this three-billion-headed lurching mooncalf humanity?"

"Your Majesty, I must first know what specific charges have been made."

"Item, he stinks of shrewd stupidity like his father Caliban."

"A fault that might be remedied by going to school a few thousand years more; at least there's manifest intelligence."

"Latent, you mean, don't you?"

"Mostly latent, but a good deal of it overt, liberated."

"Item, his fears are inconsistent: he's afraid of the dark but quite ready to play with matches."

"Another trait of childhood."

"Also of masturbating monkeys. Item, he talks a great deal about truth, but in the end, what he believes is what he wishes to believe."

"At that point I must draw your Majesty's attention to an essential point in the original indictment, namely the admission that this monster possesses roughly three billion heads. And three billion bodies. In that view of it, it's good law as well as necessary charity to insist that each head-and-body unit of the monster be tried separately."

"There isn't time, sir, there isn't time. Are you implying that not everyone is snotty?"

"Something like that."

"But then we can have no trial. No trial, no justice, no fun. Ah, damn it, I was looking forward to a hanging, with a bang-up speech from the platform and not a dry eye in the entire public square except for a few pickpockets and sellers of soft drinks."

"Callista--"

"Sir! No--fair enough. I'll put my scepter down. Maybe I'm tired of being queen. But may I keep my crown a while?"

"You've always worn it."

"No. No. Bring your chair--no, take this one, Cecil. I'd like to sit on the floor with my head on your knee--not that you're like my father at all. My crown--oh, put it away somewhere, keep it, I don't care. I don't hear that wind any more. Is it turning cold?"

"Yes, it's quite cold tonight. Callista, the prosecution will finish tomorrow, with the reading of those letters. We'll probably open after the noon recess.... Is there anything, anything at all, you haven't told me?"

"Yes."

"You said, in court today, you said there was something."

"Yes. Why did you stop moving your hand over my hair? I loved it. That's better. Cecil, I am guilty."

"The--blank?"

"Yes. Haven't you almost known it all along?"

"No. But I've been afraid you might remember something, or convince yourself that you've remembered it, and so come to believe yourself guilty."

"Oh, Cecil, this isn't belief, this is knowledge. You're trying to give me a way out before you even hear. It's like this: it came back as a clear auditory memory, the dull noise of that bottle being pulled forward on the shelf, and the cork, and a clink of glass, then the tap of her little high heels outside the bedroom door. I remembered what she said, each word very clear in that high sweet voice of hers: 'Callie, come on now!--I poured a little drink for you.' That's how it was, Cecil. And I lay still. I didn't speak. Knowing what might happen. I won't say, wishing for it to happen, but knowing, Cecil. Oh, sure enough, my mind squirmed around a bit trying to imagine the drink was from an innocent bourbon bottle, but knew all the time that the bourbon had been emptied the week before and the bottle thrown away. I'm no split personality, Cecil. Call it a paralysis from conflicting drives, if you want to. The self that had no wish to murder was the same self that--that hated her guts and wished she was dead. So I lay still. And my brain began generating the smoke-screen, first the useless fraud about a bourbon bottle that wasn't there, then the amnesia."

"I don't believe you hated her guts, Callista. She was a frustration, someone in the way, as T.J. would insist on saying, has said in fact. But I don't think you hated her as a person."

"Not for long, but long enough. I killed her."

"That was a thing that happened. You did not will it to happen. You were sick, bewildered, temporarily unable to prevent it from happening. If you'd been out in the living-room with her--do you remember that bronze paper-knife you kept on the table, a handsome thing with a sharp point? She was small, slight, your arms are strong. You know you could never in the world have taken it up against her."

"Why, dear apologist, you're only saying that I'm a coward about physical violence. I killed her by lying still. She's as dead as if I'd taken that knife to her. I say the guilt is greater. Seeing red might have excused me, or so most people would say. My very cowardice, weakness, retreat--that's what killed her. Cecil, I killed her by a failure in simple decency and common sense. If I'd been decent, sensible, I'd have run out there the moment I heard that bottle move on the shelf."

"Callista, if the good, the righteous, the respectable were half as stern in self-judgment as you are--"

"Oh, there'd be no living with them at all. Mother's a Colonial something-or-other because some worm-eaten ancestor was a Saint in the Bay Colony. I think Father must have laughed at it, but I was too young to get the point. The Puritan in me gives many a squirm. But the point is, my self-judgment serves no one now--she's dead. Well, it seems to be a jury of the righteous and respectable, more or less, who are stern enough in judging others, I've noticed. Cecil, will you give me a sharp honest answer to a question you don't want me to ask?"

"I'll try."

"Do you think we have a chance?"

"Of course we have a chance. Today was bad. They'll go on feeling Judd's collapse, in spite of common sense, in spite of everything. The poor guy couldn't have done us more harm if he'd been trying. T.J. will manage to drop in some apparently inadvertent reminder of it, no doubt in his closing speech when I'm done talking--hell, mere mention of Judd's name in a baritone tremolo would be enough, and there's no legal barrier against that. Terence will charge the jury again to forget it, and most of them will honestly try to, which would mean something only if people knew how to watch their own minds. And today was bad because this was the day when they laid out the heavy circumstantial stuff, proving your episode with Jim, making it official on the aconite, all that. But now, dear, so far as evidence is concerned, T.J. has finished, done his worst. Those letters to be read tomorrow aren't evidence. T.J. just thinks they are. He'll try to interpret them as indicating premeditation as well as motive; I know better, and I think I can make that fly up and hit him in the face, in my own closing speech or sooner. I'm not painting it bright for you, Callista. It's not bright. But we have a chance. There is this: with your story clearly told--as it has been already, really, in that Lamson interrogation--it passes my understanding how anyone in his right mind could find first degree."

"Mr. Lamson had the answer. Remember?--'the fact is, my dear girl, we just don't believe your story.'"

"Hell with Butch Lamson--he's not the jury."

"You think they might find second degree?"

"That could happen. The only just verdict would be involuntary man-slaughter."

"My love, can't you hear me? I've told you, I am guilty. Twenty to life. What do people feel when they cry out 'O God! O God!'--does the sound do something for them?"

"I don't know, Callista. I was never religious. Were you, ever?"

"Not for real, I guess. Away back, soon after Father died, I think the fluff and tinsel mythology of Sunday school had some hold on me for a short while. But I kept remembering a few of Father's comments, spoken when I was too young to get the point. They fell into place finally, made sense. When I was thirteen I told Mother I wasn't going to make the motions any more. Stuck it out, too, with a bit of surprising help from Herb. One of the rare times I've seen him lose his temper--popped half-way out of the armchair while Mother was lecturing, and said: 'God damn it, Vic, let the kid do her own thinking! She will anyway.' I could've loved him for that, if he hadn't lapsed back into being Herb Chalmers--if he wasn't a stepfather--if I wasn't a crossgrained bitch who never knows how to make advances at the right time. Well, that time Mother was so startled the artillery just didn't function. She went meek, maybe to see what Herb would do next--which was nothing. But also she never bothered me about it again, much. I suppose because her own religion is pure social conformity. If she'd had any serious convictions I might have had a battle on my hands. Twenty to life. What happens tomorrow?"

"The letters first. We sit quiet and hear them. I can't ask you to display anything you don't feel, Callista--as an actress, my dear, you're nowhere. But if you feel--well, indifferent about those letters; if it seems all far away and irrelevant, don't let your face shout to the jury that you feel that way."

"I'll be thinking of the briers. They'll read no indifference in me then, I think."

"The briers--"

"Where I lost my baby, Cecil. Some little tree whipped me across the face when I was leaving there--a birch, I think. I remember I was superstitiously grateful, glad of the sting. A primitive game, Cecil, the mind snatching at notions of punishment and atonement. We're still savages, and I suppose some of the time there's no harm in it. As if the birch tree--the whole dark place, and the thorns--had accomplished enough of the punishment so that I could meet the rest well enough. And maybe the savage, the poor greasy primordial Eve down inside, would say that I have, so far. After the letters, the State rests?"

"I expect it. Hunter doesn't bother much with surprises--not his method. The State rests, and I move they dismiss the case, and Terence will deny the motion because he must."

"Part of the ritual?"

"In a way. We open then, probably after an early noon recess. The defense is going to be brief, Callista. It's better that way. We have only a few things to say. Reiterating them too much might turn the jury against us. They've heard the essence of the defense already, in my remarks, the cross-examinations, the Lamson interrogation. We mustn't repeat ourselves too much, because--well, heaven help any defendant if the jury is bored. What's happened is that, in effect, we're required to prove a negative. In the sense of tangible proof, on the same level as--oh, say Peterson's photographs--the thing is impossible. Proving a negative usually is, and that's fairly common knowledge among people who think at all. I'll bear down on it when I talk to them in closing, and before then. We must also insist on the element of reasonable doubt. I can see that Terence is very much aware of that aspect, and you must have noticed how he's given us every break he possibly could. Including some that surprised me. I shall open the defense by calling Edith. She's prepared to say anything at all that might help you, and if T.J. tries to get tough with her in cross-examination I'm sorry for him, that's all. She'll make a monkey out of him, and I believe she'll remember the jury every minute while she does it. In her direct testimony, the thing that will help most will be her emphasis on that suicidal depression."

"Haven't I already told Mr. Lamson that no one else knew of it?"

"Yes, but Edith did know, don't you think?"

"She knew I was unhappy."

"She's told me that you gave her the story about Jim, after that damn letter of his."

"Yes, I went to pieces too, that once. But at that time I wasn't even quite certain yet about the pregnancy. As for the suicide thing, why, I wasn't consciously thinking in those terms until the day of the picnic. It was all over, you know, but I'm female enough so I didn't enjoy watching Jim the tender husband and Ann acting like a new bride, Jim all braced to speak to me politely but hoping to God he wouldn't have to--and also wanting to--yes, I could feel that. So I wandered off into that part of the garden. It wasn't till I noticed the monkshood plants that I started telling myself how that way wouldn't hurt. Then I was digging up two or three, just to look at them. I nibbled at one, and spat it out."

"You saw Edith every day that week, didn't you? Went to the studio as usual?"

"Yes."

"Oh, she knew you were in the depths. She loves you. Your moods aren't the mystery to her that they are to most people, Callista. As for her factual knowledge--well, you might as well be prepared to hear her exaggerate that a little, even lie some about how much she knew if she thinks it will help you."

"I'm strangely rich and fortunate. I have two friends."

"I wish we were stronger. Well, after Edith testifies, then you, if you will promise me one thing--two things."

"One, that I shall not say I am guilty."

"Yes. The other is that when Hunter is attacking you, as he will, without mercy and with every trick he knows, you'll remember that you, and your friends, desire you to live."

"That I can promise. The other--"

"Callista, look up at me."

"Not yet. In a moment."

"Tell me this: is there any virtue, any rational good, in declaring a literal truth when misinterpretation is inevitable, when you know to a certainty that your hearers cannot grasp the whole truth nor keep the partial truth in proportion, nor even guess at the background, the related truths?"

"Virtue--rational good--I'm too confused, Cecil. Other thoughts. I don't know. I suppose not."

"You call yourself guilty--of a momentary lapse that happened to end in disaster. But if you say that much, the jury will inevitably charge you with a different sort of guilt. They will say: she brooded and planned to murder her lover's wife, the old story--let her burn! But is it right, reasonable, is it anything but insane, that for such a lapse, when you were sick in mind and body, you should be strapped in a chair and the life burned out of you?"

"You can frighten me, Cecil. It's strange. I don't think the brute fact has really frightened me before, not completely. It wasn't real."

"It's real. I was trying to frighten you. You must not say on the stand what you've said to me tonight. I know it to be truth, because you've said it to me. Telling it to the jury will not serve truth, because their minds will make a lie of it. Look up at me now."

"I'll promise it, I think--for a bargain. I'll lie by silence, in return for a promise from you."

"A promise--what is it, Callista?"

"Promise me that if I am acquitted, I may come to you, live with you--in marriage or not, it doesn't matter--love you and care for you so long as I can have you. Give me that, and then I will lie, I'll swear anything to save my life, I'll be such an actress--"

"Callista, I'm sixty-eight, old and fat and ugly and tired."

"Hush. Understand. It's you, you, you--the self in you, not old nor young nor anything but _you_. Promise me. My promise for yours. No other terms."

"I promise it."

"Now I can look up at you. Now I know that what Edith said is true: living is journeying, and love's a region we can enter for a while."

"Yes, a region that changes if only because we do ourselves. Some try to prevent that, I suppose. They want it to be a closed room thick with perfume and curtains drawn against all weather, against night and day."

"But when I come to you--you've promised it--I'll make it a region of summer, of morning and summer evening and every star at night."

II

COURT OF GENERAL SESSIONS OF WINCHESTER COUNTY, NEW ESSEX

December 10, 1959

Action: _People vs. Callista Blake_; Justice Terence Mann presiding.

Court in session at 0956.

JUDGE MANN: Do I understand, Mr. Hunter, that you wish to have read to the jury the letters that were admitted in evidence before adjournment yesterday?

MR. HUNTER: Yes, your Honor. I am prepared to read--to go ahead with that right away.

JUDGE MANN: Let them be read by the clerk of the court.

MR. DELEHANTY: Your Honor, I have a--not laryngitis exactly, but a sort of cold. I'm perfectly ready to do as the Court directs, only I'm afraid that with this cold or whatever it is, maybe my voice won't be too clear to the jury.

JUDGE MANN: Well ... Yes, Mr. Warner?

MR. WARNER: Your Honor, the defense will not object to a reading of these letters by Mr. Hunter himself. I am certain my learned colleague would never take any improper advantage of his dramatic ability, admittedly great. Very often, however, written words are capable of conveying different meanings according to where the emphasis is placed, not because of any willful misconstruction, but simply because our language is not always a precise instrument. Therefore I would only stipulate, request rather, that if there should be any doubt in my mind, or in my client's mind, that the meaning of the letters is being correctly conveyed, we may have the privilege of interrupting the reading at that point, to indicate what we believe is the right interpretation.

JUDGE MANN: Is that agreeable to you, Mr. Hunter?

MR. HUNTER: Yes, your Honor, so long as the interruptions have to do with important points, not trivialities.

MR. WARNER: Sir, there are no trivialities in this case.

MR. HUNTER: Subject to the limitation I mentioned, the request of the defense appears reasonable, and I will not argue it.

JUDGE MANN: You may proceed, Mr. Hunter.

MR. HUNTER: The first of these letters, acknowledged by the defense to have been written by Callista Blake to James Doherty, is dated the 10th of May, 1959. Members of the jury, my dramatic ability is not, as Mr. Warner has described it, great. Any drama here is provided by the force of events, not by me. I must simply ask you to remember, while you hear these letters, that they (that is, the first three and the fifth) were written by a girl nineteen years of age, in the summer of this year, under the influence of a love affair which the testimony of witnesses has established and the defense has not denied. The first letter reads as follows:

"Jimmy--

"Tonight I cannot see you--that was really all I understood over the telephone, though I know you gave me the decent sensible reasons why you cannot come--something about work at the office, wasn't it?--for as soon as I heard you say that, I thought, Oh, bang goes the whole batch of cookies. You see, I was going to be domestic for you tonight, and I had just taken some cookies from the oven when you phoned--the airy egg-white kind, a sort of culinary idiocy because no damn good the next day, like letting air out of a tire. Therefore if I were a weeping wench they would now be soaked in brine and serve you right. But I never weep, Jimmy. Never. Remember that. So, since you cannot come, I will only count over the times I've had you with me, a miser adoring the sparkle and fall of jewels through her fingers. While you are submerged in the honest dreadfulness of whatever you do at the office--what the devil is it anyhow?--do you convey subtle conveyances and do dark deeds (these are puns) or just sit with your feet up and brood over Deals?--think of me playing with my pretties and having a better time than yourself, because this is all I can wish to do when you're away from me. Because I love you.

"It occurs to me, I never wrote to you before. You may not like me on paper. I sprawl and ramble, Dearest. Don't mind my doodling either--see the border I drew around your true name while I daydreamed and my pen was thinking for me? I'm only surprised it wasn't a tangle of Cupids, an out-of-season Valentine, and maybe it will be yet. In my here-and-now mood I would draw them saucy, I think (most of them), strutting and romping and showing off their little male apostrophes--all, I suppose, with a sneaking resemblance to you. Because I love you.

"No, don't say it's reckless and foolish of me to write at all--I know it. I can't care, not now. I tell you, Jimmy, what we have (is it possible it's only ten days?) is something that could not happen with Ann. Or anywhere in her world. I tell myself, I am not she, she is not me, my love (you know it) is nothing like what could happen for you with anyone but me. And there's my cure for jealousy--if I could apply it, if I could make my head rule me a little more, my crazy heart a little less. I want you, I'm empty and dull in your absence, tonight this is the only way I can talk to you. So let me talk, and think me foolish and reckless, and destroy this scrawled thing if you think best. It's me, though. Remember when you throw it away, it's me. And perhaps (because I love you) I wouldn't like you to burn me.

"More than you have already.

"Yes, I will type the envelope and mark it PERSONAL, lest the chaste eyes of Miss Anderson be stricken unto confusion and dismay. Damn 'em, why hasn't the Postoffice a Bureau of Hollow Oaks? Ooh--now I think of it, there is--not an oak, but a big maple with a hole in the trunk about seven feet above ground, on the path between your house and Mother's, near the pond. I saw a squirrel in residence there last year, stuck his head out and told me with the usual fuss that it was his'n. No good, I guess, because he's probably still there, and would think poorly of anyone dropping a letter into his living-room. He'd eat it or use it for nest-lining. That's how Nature is, you know, not a bit cooperative with the frills of romance, only with the essentials--but there, how cooperative indeed! As if, so far as Nature cares, every atom, every motion of life were aimed at nothing but the mounting of female by male and the begetting of young. Well, it comes to me that you with your long legs could reach that hole in the maple, though I'd have to stand on something. It comes to me that a letter could be squirrel-proofed in a metal box. Let us reflect on this."

Members of the jury, I might say in passing that because of this mention in the letter, the maple tree in question was examined. It does have a hole in it, nearer eight feet above ground than seven. Nothing was found there except an abandoned squirrel's nest; no sign of any previous disturbance by a human agency. [_Laughter by the defendant._] I see Miss Blake is amused, which is her privilege I suppose. [_Disturbance at rear of room, a man (James Doherty) leaving his seat for the exit; Mr. Hunter waiting for quiet._] The letter resumes:

"I love you as a sleeping seed in the earth must love the rains of spring, blindly, thoughtlessly, responding because it must--the shell breaks underground from the inward pressure, the outer warmth and fertile moisture. Shall I one day become a flower for you and know the sun? I am still in the dark, and rather blind, and yet happy to be living. You my awakener, it seems to me you're finding no such happiness. Am I too much for you, Jimmy? Too weird and different? Poor Jimmy, did you want only that May-day moment, and then discover the dryad had caught you fast and would not let go? There are thorns in my branches, I suppose. I never wanted them to wound. Oh, I must write no more like this, or I'll be needing you too much to sleep.

"Don't look distressed, as you did last night, and ask me, what are we to do? I don't know yet, Jimmy. There's an answer and we'll find it somehow. Likely it will be you that finds it, and not myself. I don't know. Maybe I'd never try to tell you what to do, even if I were inwardly certain what was best. May-day, it seemed ridiculous to me that anything about this could be a solemn Problem--no more a problem than the romping of animals. It is, of course--I merely had to shove that aside (without regrets) for the sake of May-day. It is, and I--(here comes a truth, my darling, that may be unwelcome or distressing; if it is, just set it down to my weirdness and forgive me for it)--I am, in many important ways, a much more civilized human creature than you. So civilized--so wide a gap between the cool life of the mind and the violence of that primitive part which never grows civilized in anyone--that I can never hope to explain myself, or be anything but a stranger to the easy routines of existence. My mind looks down on both of us, Jimmy, sees well enough that we are foolish lovers running into the jungle blind--(running, I will not say driven)--and inviting disaster in everything we do. But if now I only glimpsed you or heard your voice--why, away with all thought, the self you roused up on our May-day would be mad for you, throw away all sober knowledge, bite your throat, dance like a maynad and burn your flesh in a blaze of love."

DEFENDANT: The word is "maenad," if it matters.

MR. HUNTER: I stand corrected, I suppose. May it please the Court, my understanding was that any interruption of this reading would be made by counsel, in an orderly manner, not by the accused who is not at present under oath.

JUDGE MANN: It must be so ordered. I hope you understand the legal necessity, Miss Blake. If any other point comes up, please draw your counsel's attention and let him deal with it. That is the method required of us here. Incidentally, if anything during this reading makes it desirable for you to confer at any length with Mr. Warner, a short recess can always be requested, and the Court stands ready to allow it. Go ahead, Mr. Hunter.

MR. HUNTER: Well, the first letter is nearly finished. It concludes with these words:

"Understand, Jimmy, that I fit no pattern. No one can own me, no one can make me over. I was born a heretic and so live. No one can catch me except if I will.

"I love you. "Callista."

The second letter, also from Callista Blake to James Doherty, bears no date except Thursday, but it is in an envelope marked PERSONAL, addressed in typing to Mr. Doherty at his office at Judd and Doherty, 12 Somerset Street, Winchester. The postmark on this envelope is June 18th. It reads as follows:

"Dear--

"More than a month ago I wrote you a letter, and I remember that although you didn't say so, you weren't exactly pleased at my doing it. So I am reckless, but look, love, the heavens didn't fall, the grass is still green and soft (as we should know) and so here I go again, because I want to take advantage of an evening when I seem to be fairly clear-headed, or as near it as I ever am. Anyway, darling, you told me Miss Anderson is out with a cold, so this is sure to pass through no hands but yours, isn't it?

"Jimmy, I can almost wish that Ann did know. Don't blow your top--caution will prevail. I'm just wishing. The fact of secrecy I don't particularly mind--what business of anyone else is it that I love you? I don't care about parading you before the world in a proper woman's look-what-I-caught manner--that's nothing, to me there's even a kind of indecency in public possessiveness. But I do mind the limitations and humiliations of secrecy, the haunting by social fears, enforced furtiveness--can't go alone into a restaurant with you, where some friend of yours and Ann's might notice you together with that screwball broad with the limp. That I hate. It's a spoiling thing. I wonder more and more whether we are big enough to stand much more of it. And yet if you tire of me, or if the dreary social pressure forces you away from me--I swear the world's turning into one big God-damned suburb--I don't know what will happen to me. I don't know if I'm big enough to take it. I suppose I am. I just don't know.

"Please tell me: is your own religious feeling so strong that you do actually feel sinful when you're with me? I hardly dared write that. Do you realize how badly you hedged when I asked you almost the same thing two nights ago? I wasn't asking about Ann's views, blast you--I know she'd condemn the whole thing without a moment's pause for thought--I wanted to find out how it was with you, but all you could talk about was how Ann would feel. Well, I picked the wrong time of course. A real feminine trick, to cross-examine you with your head on my breast and only a few minutes after the little death. Bitchy of me, I suppose I was going by instinct, and when I do that, bitchy is my middle name. But see, dear, everything's calm now, I'm not whispering in your ear, I'm only fumbling for words on paper. I suppose you do know, don't you, that if you had to be free of me I would let you go? The dryad's thorns would scratch some--that I couldn't help, couldn't help your bleeding a bit--but they couldn't hold you, and would not. I don't want you as a prisoner. You are already a prisoner, and I wish I might set you free.

MR. WARNER: I will call the jury's attention to the fact that there is no actual break in the letter at the point where Mr. Hunter stopped reading. The thought there is incomplete, and Miss Blake went on to complete it in the same paragraph.

MR. HUNTER: I will call the jury's attention to the fact that I have been reading a rather difficult handwriting for several minutes, and am slightly hoarse. I would also point out that it is the end of a page, and the indentation at the beginning of the next page looks to me very much like the beginning of a paragraph.

MR. WARNER: Mr. District Attorney, you must have noticed that Miss Blake's writing does not make a very precise left-hand margin, but the paragraph indentations are characteristically quite deep.

MR. HUNTER: Very well--I don't want to argue a point like this--it's all one paragraph if you like. May I continue?

MR. WARNER: By all means, finish the paragraph.

MR. HUNTER (reading):

"... No, I don't hate Ann, I was not thinking only of Ann when I wrote that.

"Another thing, by the way, that I hardly dared to write.

"Jimmy, I need to know: if Ann would allow a separation, and if we went somewhere--no matter where, so it's a long way off--would you be mentally, emotionally _able_ to live with me? Look into yourself. Tell me, if you can, what would happen inside you, supposing the situation was like that. Make it far away--Arizona, Tahiti, island of Capri, who cares?--and I am with you, in your bed at night and with you in all the long bright days. Would you see me still as a human woman who loves you and who would be happy to bear you children?--that could be, you know; a doctor assured me of it a couple of years ago, the little deformity is no obstacle. Or would I become the whore who 'led you astray' and 'wrecked your life'?

"You know, Jimmy, it hasn't seemed to me (but I could be so damned wrong!) that religion goes very deep with you. Isn't it mostly a matter of being brought up in a certain way that automatically shuts out other views without seriously examining them? I'm trying to suggest that unlike Ann, you're really not embedded in religion like a fly in amber. I've made no secret of my own agnosticism with you--wouldn't have occurred to me to do so--and that hasn't appeared to trouble you particularly. You do shy away, you don't like the topic, I suppose you feel the way so many people do nowadays, that religion is all right but talking about it is not quite nice. But I can't imagine that you condemn me in your heart (do you?) for relying on my own reason, being unafraid of doubt, interested in proof, critical of all self-appointed authority?

"So I'll even dare ask you: just where is the mercy, the rationale, the loving-kindness, in an ethical-religious system that makes me a whore bound for hell because I love you and welcome intercourse with you and want to live with you?

"I want to see you tomorrow, Jimmy. You spoke of having to work late because of Miss Anderson's being out sick--may I come there in the evening, just to see you for a few minutes? I'll be well-behaved (I hope). There are one or two other things--things even I don't care to scrawl on paper. If you call and say I mustn't come, of course I won't, but--please?

"For the first time in our experience I shall be listening for the phone and hoping you don't call. 'How do I love thee? Let me count the ways'--I can't, I can't.

"Callista."

The third letter, members of the jury, is again from Callista Blake to James Doherty. It is dated June 25th, just a week later than the one I last read, and was addressed, like the other two, to Mr. Doherty at his office. It reads as follows:

"Jimmy--

"Didn't you say you would call me Monday evening? What happened? I remember you said you would be tied up over the week end--if only my silly hungry arms had been the rope to tie you!--well, so I counted the hours to Monday evening, and glued myself to the phone, but no Jimmy. I know I mustn't call your house--you needn't have reminded me of that, last Friday! Tuesday, though, I did try to call you at the office--I'm sorry, Jimmy, I know you didn't want me to, but I was miserable, I had to try to reach you somehow--but you were out, anyway Mr. Judd answered the phone and said you were, and he sounded so chilly--am I a black cat across his path or something?--I didn't know he disliked me. What's happening, Jimmy? Could be purely my nerved-up imagination. But all week, no Jimmy. Couldn't you at least have got as far as a phone booth? Oh hell, I'm writing like a sniveling brat.

"Lately I've been having too many morbid thoughts. I know I behaved badly Friday evening--you didn't want anything to get started, and I had to act like a whining bitch in heat. You should know there's more to me than that--I guess you do, I guess you do. Well, since that evening I've now and then thought of us--I even dreamed something of the kind--as if we were no wiser than a pair of kids slipping out behind the barn to study the difference between a boy and a girl--with peevish grown-ups likely to come around the corner of the building any minute. I've lost some of the dream--I think we did get caught and stood there frozen waiting for the wrath. Only the boy in the dream wasn't quite you. Be jealous, damn you.

"Are we so terribly far apart? I'm beginning to understand there's plenty about me you don't even like. It's not strange. Didn't I tell you at the start, or try to, that I'm not easy to get along with? I often have a bad enough time trying to get along with myself. But Jimmy, Dearest, _all_ people are far apart in a lot of important ways. No exceptions. And all people have elements in common too, things they can share, use to bridge the gulf between self and self, if they only knew it. Don't you think we have enough in common so that if we both tried hard and honestly and lovingly, we could live happily together?

"I know, I know--I wrote that as if I were assuming that Ann would set you free. Oh, I like you and don't like you, for not wanting to talk about her with me. Like you for it because I know it's loyalty, you're trying to be fair to her, spare her pain, you still love her in many ways--and somehow I know about all of them, and respect every one of them whether you believe that or not. And dislike it, it hurts, because--well, because I happen to be the one under the gun, Jimmy, and I keep thinking if I knew more about her I might see my own way better. I love you in ways she never imagined, couldn't imagine. She's not a passionate woman, Jimmy--as I don't suppose you need to be told. She's sweet, possessive, domestic, good to you so far as she knows how to be, loves you in her fashion so long as you conform to what she wants you to be. Undoubtedly it troubles her that you haven't happened to have children yet. Loves you in her fashion--oh, Jimmy, to my thinking, and I'm not a fool, loving an image of what you'd like another person to be, that's not love at all, just self-love and arrogance.

"Am I doing it too? Am I in love with what I wish you were? I mustn't _always_ shy away from that thought--I'll have to look at it straight some time, can't now somehow, not now, not now. I don't think it's true. Anyway I will assure you, pretty Ann never woke up at night whimpering your name and tasting blood on her lip.

"There's no solution that won't hurt somebody. I'm selfish too--like you, like Ann if she knew and understood, I don't want to be hurt any more than I have been. I don't hate Ann, I don't want to hate her. I don't want anything except to get away somewhere with you--are we savages to be held in line by magic words mumbled in the mouth of a priest?--because I love you best and need you.

"Silence is the cruelest of a coward's weapons. It's not like you to use it against me. Please write, or call me. Please come to me.

"Callista."

The fourth letter is typed, dated July 5th, 1959, and signed only with a typed capital J. You remember yesterday Mr. Lamson testified that James Doherty himself, as well as Miss Blake, acknowledged his authorship of this letter. It reads:

"Dear Callista:

"I meant to write to you sooner, but have been very busy, so am afraid the time has slipped by, besides I do not know just how to say what I ought to, except that we must relinquish the prospect we have discussed and that you mention in your letter, as it would not work out for the best but am afraid would have bad consequences to all concerned. I consider myself very much to blame having given you a wrong idea of the situation, although that certainly was not my intention. I think all we can do is try to forget about it, because that is what we must do, unless the situation changes some time. I am sorry to have to say it as you may feel disappointed and that I have let you down, as a matter of fact I feel that myself, am afraid I may have treated you rather badly letting you take things for granted when I ought not to have done so, although that was not my intention, and am very sorry if it is so. I feel you are not to blame in any way but I am, I know, and the only thing we can do is sort of forget the whole thing and hope you can forgive me for letting you down.

"Sincerely, "J."

"P.S. I feel we ought not to get in touch again about this for a while as there is nothing we can do. Please read between the lines and don't be angry."

Since the defendant appears to find this letter amusing, I can only say that her sense of humor has not much in common with mine.

MR. WARNER: Is the defendant on trial for changes in facial expression? I did not know that an unhappy smile was an indictable offense.

JUDGE MANN: The comments of both counsel are out of order. Continue, please.

MR. HUNTER: As you have already heard, members of the jury, the last letter we have here was not mailed, but found in Miss Blake's possession. During her interrogation by Mr. Lamson, she stated certain reasons for not mailing it--part of the testimony which you have heard, to which you will give whatever weight you believe it deserves. This last letter is dated August 8th, 1959, more than a month after Miss Blake received that letter from James Doherty. I would remind you too that August 8th was the day after the picnic which has been mentioned several times in the testimony. The letter reads:

"Dear Jimmy:

"Understand, before you start reading this, that you need not answer it unless you wish. I will wait a while, and then take silence for your answer if that is how it must be. I had almost accepted silence already, or thought I had, most of the time this last month. But I saw you yesterday--might have stayed away, meant to, could not--with all the fog of company manners between us, and discovered what I should have known: I am not cured of you. I wish I were, and I shall be after a while. I've wished I could hate or despise you--can't do that, but I'll be able to forget you sometime, and if there's no happiness at least there will be peace, of one sort or another.

"I have gone by two periods, Jimmy. In those good days of June--yes, they were good--we evidently managed to start a certain arrogant little Blake-Doherty thing which now lives in me as if he belonged there. And he does. What does this knowledge do to you? Sorry? Scared? Maybe a little bit happy, or proud? Or just angry with me? I'm shocked to realize I don't know you well enough to guess the answer.

"One thing I will not do--and your religion would approve my decision, I believe (at the same time that it provides some cruel obstacles in the way of carrying it out). I will not, Jimmy--I will _not_ creep off on the wrong side of our idiot laws and have an abortion. I want this child. Crazy of me it may be, but I already love it, while it's just a blob of almost-nothing that'll soon be making me sick and physically scared. I want it.

"And I want the child to have a father. From the start. I've seen too much of petticoat government--it reeks. I don't trust my own self to bring up a child alone. In spite of all the best knowledge I have, sooner or later I'd have some damned uprush of maternity to the brain and start making a lot of the mistakes all mothers make--including some my own mother made with me, no doubt--and nobody to check me, nobody to fill the father's place that must not be empty if a child is to grow up straight and good. I won't have my baby crippled that way.

"He's yours too, Jimmy. It's your seed in me, the life-package from all your grandfathers and grandmothers. He's from Ireland, dear, he's from Italy where my father's mother was born, he's from one of the embraces when your sweet strong body could not free itself until I was willing to let you go. I frightened you sometimes, didn't I? I will again, or at least I dream of it.

"All right, let's be sober. For religious reasons, Ann will never even consider a divorce. There is such a thing as separation, that would allow you to provide for her but live with me. The legal formula is not too important to me--I wish we might have it, but it would not hurt me to live without it, and we could educate the child so that his understanding would be too big to care for such cretinous words as 'illegitimate.' With your training you could find work anywhere in the States--or abroad for that matter, Canada, England, Australia. So could I. I understand the kind of art work that makes money, as well as photography. I also know shorthand and typing. We'd make out wherever we went, and be the same as married. It only needs your will for it, Jimmy, and an amount of courage that isn't abnormal. Others faced with the same difficulty have done it.

"Granted, Ann would be hurt badly, for a while. She'd consider us both lost in sin. (Do you?) Her pride would be hurt, and her love for you, which may be strong--I don't know that, yes or no. Jimmy, you and Ann don't have children. You and I do have a child. Granted also that Ann is good and sweet and conventionally right. Does that give her the right--

Members of the jury, three words are crossed out here, but not illegible. It is my understanding that these letters will be available for the inspection of the jury; the purpose of reading them is to save time and to make sure of the correct interpretation, as Mr. Warner pointed out. Now I think I should read these crossed-out words, but will not do so if the defense has any objection. Do you wish to look at the page again, Mr. Warner?

MR. WARNER: Not necessary, but wait a moment, please. [_Conferring with defendant._] The crossed-out words may be read, so long as the jury is given the whole picture. The words are still legible, it's true, but not clearly, and it was evidently not Miss Blake's intention that they should be legible, if she had ever mailed the letter.

MR. HUNTER: Thank you, Counselor. The words crossed out are "to destroy us"--"Does that give her the right to destroy us"--but with those words crossed out, the letter reads thus:

"Does that give her the right to keep you and me apart and prevent my child from having a father?

"Living seems to be full of situations where you can't do a good thing without an accompanying evil. I suppose it's questions of this kind that make people give up trying to solve their own ethical problems and ask some supernatural authority to do it for them. And yet I would think that the only answer in any such dilemma is to decide which is greater, the evil or the good. If they seem to balance, doubtless inaction is better than trying to perform your good act. But if one is clearly greater than the other, isn't the answer plain? I know this goes contrary to your religious views, but Jimmy, this once, think whether I may not be right and yourself mistaken.

"I am trying to think straight, about the years ahead, the child, about living with you, the difficulties we'd face. I'm trying not to remember that you did look at me yesterday once or twice as a lover might, and with the sunlight falling across your cheekbones, before I quit playing with the Wayne kids and wandered off. Maybe some time I'll tell you where I went and what I did.

"I can't think of Ann as anything but an innocent bystander. She needs you in the common ways, but I--"

Members of the jury, the letter ends there. The State rests.

JUDGE MANN: The Court will hear any motions.

MR. WARNER: Your Honor, I move that the case of the People against Callista Blake be dismissed on the following grounds: one, that the prosecution has not demonstrated that the death of Ann Doherty resulted from a criminal action; two, that the prosecution has not, by witnesses, connected the defendant Callista Blake with the death of Ann Doherty beyond a reasonable doubt.

JUDGE MANN: The motion is denied, Mr. Warner. Are there other motions?

MR. WARNER: No, your Honor, not at this time.

JUDGE MANN: The Court stands adjourned until 1 P.M.

7

Upon this, by us has she been required to voluntarily declare herself to be, and to have always been, a demon of the nature of a Succubus, which is a female devil whose business it is to corrupt Christians by the blandishments and flagitious delights of love. To this the speaker has replied that the affirmation would be an abominable falsehood, seeing that she had always felt herself to be a most natural woman.

Then her irons being struck off by the torturer, the aforesaid has removed her dress, and has maliciously and with evil design bewildered and attacked our understanding with the sight of her body, the which, for a fact, exercises upon a man supernatural coercion.

BALZAC, _The Succubus_

I

In the robing room after the noon recess, Judge Mann was assailed by a feeling of being out of place, ludicrously so, dismayingly. The village atheist blundering into a crowd of churchgoers to retrieve his hat; or an explorer required to take part in a tribal ritual without a briefing on the rules. Innocent oversight, by the way, on the part of local chieftains and witchdoctors, for why wouldn't they assume that everybody knew the rules from infancy as they did? _What am I doing here?_

He could ask the question of Joe Bass and receive an intelligent answer. No good. No use making Joe uneasy about the Judge's state of mind.

Even the door to the courtroom looked unfamiliar. Why had he never before noticed that the swirling grain of the oak resembled the smoke lines of a bonfire? He stood with his hand on the knob, reflecting also that technique is not enough: he should spend several months, say a year, in a special kind of discipline, before it would be right to start taking piano pupils--supposing he had any such intention. He turned the knob, hearing the muted uproar of a hundred conversations in the dull room beyond; opened the door a crack, and the noise became a sonorous flow; opened it then all the way, and the roar was shut off by the action, since every talker had been watching that door, impatient for the continuation of ritual. _For example, I would have to learn much more about children_--

"All rise!"

He walked to the Judge's bench a stranger. Why the devil must they stand up? Settling their damn lunches?

Seated, noticing how quickly today the rustle and throat-clearing subsided, his eyes were annoyed by shabbiness. Old stains, scratches on the woodwork, in every corner a pinch of dust; on every face--Callista Blake's, Hunter's, even Mr. Delehanty's--the marks of that peculiarly human strain that people experience in the presence of the heavy institutions they themselves have made. Maybe his eyes were exaggerating the dust, to support the bias of his mind, which insisted on pointing up the dirt, cracks, awkwardly mended spots and general bad housekeeping of the law itself. _Well, there are certain things to do before I go._ "Are you ready for your opening, Mr. Warner?"

"Yes, your Honor." The Old Man could hardly say that no one is ever ready to send his love into the bonfire. "Members of the jury, I don't think you want to hear any elaborate opening speech from me. A great part of the defense of Callista Blake has already been brought out by testimony for the prosecution. I am not referring only to the transcript of the interrogation of Miss Blake by District Attorney Lamson, in the course of which she told practically everything that she can tell if I put her on the witness stand. I am thinking, for example, of the testimony of a very honest and impartial State policeman, concerning footprints and other evidence by that pond in Shanesville. I'll revert to his testimony in my closing words. I'm thinking of the testimony of Mrs. Jason." Anyway, Mann thought, Cecil Warner's voice was in good shape; he was slow, and calm, and steady on his feet. "And I am thinking, of course, of those letters written by Callista Blake which the District Attorney by some process of reasoning utterly beyond me--I suppose it's reasoning--appears to regard as evidence of guilt.

"We're confronted here, ladies and gentlemen, by a case in which the most vital elements are intangible, subjective. Now, the law doesn't like intangibles. That's natural. If we're dealing with clear, everyday facts of observation we know where we are, we're used to thinking in those terms, we can manage as well as if we were manipulating a solid object in the hand. Take a common sort of case for an example: a man falls in getting off a bus, is injured, and sues the traction company. All right: you've got eyewitnesses, medical testimony, and a few fairly simple questions to decide: did he fall? was he injured, and if so how badly? was the bus company at fault, and if so what's a just compensation for the injuries? A jury will have minor difficulties in a case like that: there's the possibility that the man's a clever fraud, and since most people are not good observers, the eyewitnesses may contradict each other a little, but on the whole juries don't have too hard a time in reaching a fair verdict in such cases.

"Here it's not so. In this case the tangible facts are hardly in dispute, the vital problem is the interpretation of those facts. There was aconitine in Callista Blake's apartment; the defense has not denied it. I know, and Callista Blake knows, why it was there; the State will try to tell you it was there because of a deep-laid premeditated plot to kill Ann Doherty. Ann Doherty did drink the poison there, undoubtedly; we know it happened accidentally, the State will say she was intended to drink it. The State has demonstrated an affair between Callista Blake and James Doherty; we have not denied it nor thought of denying it. And the State, by inference, supplies Callista Blake with the motive of common jealousy and argues that this led to premeditated murder. Now Callista herself knows that isn't so; I know it, and so do a few others really well acquainted with her: they're aware that no degree of sexual jealousy would ever drive her to perform such an act. But how in the world is she to prove it to twelve honest jurors who never saw her before the trial? It's just not in the field of tangible proof. I could put her on the stand, and if she talked to you all day long, what could she say on that subject that isn't already said in the traditional words she's already spoken when she was indicted?--'I am not guilty.' Finally, the defense does not deny that Callista Blake drove out to Shanesville soon after Ann Doherty left. The State will have it that she went out there in a sort of pursuit of Ann Doherty, to make sure Ann died. We know she did it because she had just discovered that Ann might have got some of that stuff; we know she went out there in an attempt to reach Ann before it was too late and save her life; and it was too late, and Ann Doherty was dead. So there you have state and prosecution asserting precise contraries. We cannot, by tangible evidence, prove the intentions, motives, ideas of Callista Blake; neither can the State. In this connection I'll merely remind you for the present that the State's own witness Sergeant Shields very clearly and carefully said there was no way of telling how Ann's body got into the pond; he made it clear there isn't a scrap of that precious tangible evidence to show that Callista Blake did anything except stand there and look down, as she told Mr. Lamson she did.

"Because of the nature of the case, the primary questions of reasonable doubt and criminal intent or absence of it, I am intending to call only two witnesses for the defense. As a prosecutor, and taking it for granted that he has somehow honestly convinced himself of Callista Blake's guilt, it was unavoidable that my able adversary should have piled up all that mass of circumstantial evidence, even though hardly any of it was in dispute. As a prosecutor, he had to do it; trying to your patience as well as mine, but that's how the law works. Yet when the dust of argument has settled and you've gone into that jury room, I think you'll see--or more likely you do already--how the whole thing comes down to the question whether or not you believe Callista's word. The two witnesses I mean to call are the two who can come nearer than any others to telling you, showing you, convincing you, what kind of girl, what kind of human being Callista Blake really is. And I have no more to say by way of argument until after they have been heard. Miss Edith Nolan, please!"

She came forward not briskly but with poise, her thin face showing the gravity of concentration. She wore the same green tweed suit, in some need of pressing, that she had worn all through the trial. The dark shade, nearly the green of hemlock, set off her red hair pleasantly, the Judge thought, but did not belong too well with light blue eyes; and to wear the same costume four days running was maybe a little odd. He noticed also, and hoped the jury would not, her moment's hesitation as Mr. Delehanty recited the oath and held out the Bible for her. Probably she would prefer to affirm but had decided against such action to avoid offending the jury, accepting what to her might be a distasteful absurdity for the sake of her friend. Edith Nolan would not be, like Mrs. Jason, a truth-teller at any cost, though the Judge supposed that whatever she said would be in the service of truth as she saw it.

And what would Callista Blake do if and when it was time for her to take the oath? If Callista had learned anything yet about the grown-up necessities of compromise, it did not appear in the evidence nor in her own actions thus far. The girl who made the responses in the Lamson interrogation seemed too young, too sharply earnest to understand flexibility or the art of yielding minor issues for the sake of great ones. He thought: _Let her learn it quickly!_ And instructed himself irritably to quit borrowing trouble ahead of time.

Miss Nolan also took care to make no open demonstration of the friendship which the Judge knew existed between herself and Cecil Warner. One swift eloquent glance he saw, a silent declaration: "_I'm with you and will do whatever I can._" Then she was in the witness chair, private tensions skillfully hidden, giving routine information: age thirty-one, unmarried, portrait and free-lance photographer, A.B. Radcliffe plus a year of art school, studio and residence at 96 Hallam Street, Winchester.

"Is that address near to 21 Covent Street, Miss Nolan?"

"Yes, four of those long uptown blocks."

"How long have you known the defendant Callista Blake?"

"It's almost a year and a half now. She's been my assistant at the studio since July of last year. She answered an advertisement of mine, I employed her, and we very soon became close friends."

"Did she take her apartment at Covent Street soon after she began to work for you?"

"I think it was the same week. I helped her look for it."

"The close friendship you speak of--tell us more of that, will you? For instance, you're familiar with the details of Callista's life--past history, opinions, tastes, temperament, things of that sort?"

"Yes, Mr. Warner. A year and a half isn't a long time, but I think I know Callista as well as I could know my own younger sister if I had one, or better. Interests in common, a natural sympathy I suppose it might be called. We agree on many things, and when we differ we know how to talk, get our ideas across to each other."

"Your shared interest in artistic work has been a large part of that bond of friendship, hasn't it?"

"Yes, it has."

"Do you at present do any artistic work yourself, besides photography?"

"Not just at present. I have in the past. Illustrations for a children's book a couple of years ago. Nothing grand, but I hear the kids liked them. A few things like that."

"In any case you do have professional training and professional standing. I'm going to ask you for what the law calls an expert opinion. Miss Nolan, if you were not personally acquainted with Callista Blake, and if you were called on to judge her work, say in an exhibition of good serious modern painters, how would you rate it?"

Judge Mann saw T. J. Hunter consider an objection and settle for a somewhat elaborate bored look. The red-haired woman smiled, for the first time. Mann's pencil on the doodle-pad rather angrily crossed out its attempt to draw her face, not in cartoon but in a portrait sketch. It had escaped him altogether. _I haven't got it._ He laid the pencil down.

"It's hard to imagine myself not acquainted with Callista. But I think I can do it, Mr. Warner, for that one question. If I knew nothing about her, if I were seeing her painting or drawing for the first time under those conditions, I think it would be likely to outshine anything else in the show."

"If it were like this, for instance?" Intent on Edith Nolan's face, Mann had not been aware of Warner's drawing from his pocket a folded cover paper. Now it was in the red-haired woman's hands, and she was taking from it a page, evidently from a small scratch-pad, gazing at it and steadying it with her other hand because her fingers had started to shake. He thought in distress: _Damn it, we do have to have some rules_--

"Oh! When did she do this, Mr. Warner?"

"This morning, in court. Scratch paper. Before the reading of the letters, when Mr. Hunter and I were in side-bar conference and nothing else was happening."

"She was remembering little Doris Wayne."

"May it please the Court, is Mr. Warner introducing some of the defendant's art work as an exhibit for the defense, or is this just a love feast?"

"Mr. Hunter, I think your sarcasm may be distasteful to the jury as well as to the Court." _But it isn't, and Terence, for Christ's sake hold your water! That was too strong._ "May I see the sketch, Miss Nolan?"

Warner handed it up. Turned away from the jury, his round sagging face showed nothing of triumph, looked only tired and frightened. Another face confronted the Judge, with the arrogance and pathos and curious vulnerable mirth of childhood. Doris would be about ten, said Callista's affectionate unsentimental lines, and she was amused about something: perky, uncertain, lovable, maybe a bit dangerous. He thought: _Now I know. And though I know it, she still could die. Judge Cleever_--"I don't suppose it would qualify as an exhibit, Mr. Warner, since it isn't directly relevant to any of the legal issues. However, if you wish the jury to see it, the Court has no objection."

Hunter said quietly: "But I object. I haven't seen it, but I consider the introduction of it an unwarranted attempt to influence the jury's sympathies with irrelevant matters, and by an improper method."

"I will overrule your objection, Mr. Hunter. The defense is privileged to question Miss Nolan as a character witness. Miss Blake's artistic ability is an aspect of her character that it would be absurd to ignore. No objection was made by you when Mr. Warner asked Miss Nolan for an expert opinion in the field of art, in which she's evidently qualified to speak. The introduction of this sketch is merely a natural means of supplementing and demonstrating what Miss Nolan has to say."

Reluctantly, for it was loss of contact with something valued and not yet understood, he watched the drawing pass into the lumpy hands of Peter Anson, foreman, hands that held it briefly under bothered eyes and passed it on. Casually, and perhaps to cover the intentness with which he was watching the jury, Cecil Warner said: "Being older, more experienced, art school and all that, you've taught Callista to some extent, haven't you?"

The drawing escaped from the blank glance of Emma Beales into the hands of LaSalle, which held it for some time, and gently. Edith Nolan said slowly: "About technique, handling materials, things like that, yes, Mr. Warner, but ..." The drawing rested in Mrs. Kleinman's lap while she changed to reading glasses; probably the good lady couldn't get used to bifocals. "Her ability is very much greater than anything I have, so it would be truer to say, Mr. Warner, that she has taught me." Mr. Fielding looked at the face of Doris Wayne with lifted brows that might mean indifference or annoyance, and passed the drawing to Helen Butler. "You see, aside from her own talent, Callista has that faculty of searching out whatever's best in anyone, and--" _Why must Helen Butler look at me? I am not Callista's accuser!_--"and making it better if she can."

_Don't get too rich for their blood, Miss Nolan! Hide a little the fact that you love her, or they'll begin to discount what you say._ And yet, the Judge reflected, she could hardly be expected to dissemble; there would be a false note if she did. And how softly the woman was speaking!--as if they were here not to consider Callista Blake's life or death but only to talk about her as friends might talk affectionately of another in absence. He looked again at the jury. Miss Butler had relinquished the drawing to a hand from the back row and was frowning into the distance, her mild intelligent face more disturbed than he had seen it at any time during the trial. A Sunday painter, wasn't she?--he tried to remember her answers during voir dire examination, but they had gone vague: a rather mousy personality, good and pleasant but not strong.

The foreman Peter Anson fidgeted irritably, and settled into a glumness. Something wrong there. Judge Mann felt a kind of pain, in its beginning hardly distinguishable from a twisted muscle or the first warning of nausea. Anson's blunt face had become readable; at any rate Judge Mann's interpretation of its look came to him with such force that it was difficult for him to doubt his own insight: the blobby features were saying that to Mr. Peter Anson long-hairs and especially long-hair intellectual women were one big pain in the ass. You could understand it. Anson was a man who liked things simple and comfortable; he wanted larger issues settled by authority and formula, and you could say the wish derived from an honest humility, inarticulate awareness of his own mental limitations; unfortunately it meant that anything not covered by authority and formula must be brushed aside, or ignored--or hated. Confronted by a manifestly human Callista Blake or Edith Nolan--well, Anson was a good little joe and would try to be fair about it; BUT ... Only later did the Judge admit that his sense of unease, so much resembling obscure physical pain, could be the beginning of despair.

The drawing came back to Warner from the hands of Peter Anson but without another glance from him; for a moment his stubby hands were eloquent, saying: "_This paper has nothing to do with me._"

"It's true, isn't it, Miss Nolan, that although you're naturally fond of Callista and loyal to her, the fondness and loyalty are based on understanding? I mean, you know your friend's faults and weaknesses too. You have, maybe, something of an older sister's detachment?"

"Yes, I think it's fair to say that. Mr. Warner, if that drawing isn't to be used further, as an exhibit or anything--may I have it?"

"Well ..." The moment was a long one, Cecil Warner turning to look at Callista Blake with something more than inquiry, Edith and Callista gazing at each other directly, unsmiling, yet the Judge wished the moment might be prolonged for the sake of his own understanding. A kind of brilliance and a hush; the courtroom no more present than the ocean is present at some moment of wind and shining sand and sunlight: only the three of them; the three of them, and himself somehow more than a simple observer. Callista smiled: climax of a moment that could have lasted no longer. Warner was saying quickly: "Of course, my dear--" and giving the drawing to Edith, who put it away in her handbag and shut the clasp with care. "Now would you, as an observant friend, say that Callista is moodier than most people? Subject to depressions?"

Hunter bayed: "I suggest Miss Nolan's qualifications as a psychiatrist have not exactly been established."

"My question refers to a simple observation anyone might make."

"Is that a formal objection, Mr. Hunter?"

"No, your Honor. But I hope the testimony isn't going to stray into fields where only a psychiatrist would be competent to speak."

"Let your mind be at rest on that point, Mr. District Attorney. Is Callista Blake subject to periods of depression, Miss Nolan?"

"Yes, decidedly." Judge Mann considered the possibility of exaggeration, not falsehood exactly but close to it. Surely Callista Blake was not what his brother Jack would call a depressive type, if that word was still favored in the jargon. "However, Mr. Warner, I think Callista's depressions are generally related to some external cause. Related to things that happen to her." _Yes, Redhead, that helps--some._

"Were you at all acquainted with Mrs. James Doherty?"

"By sight, hardly more. I believe I met her three times in all, when I was visiting Callista's family in Shanesville."

"Have you met Mr. James Doherty any more often than that?"

"I don't think so. Same occasions, and then one or two times since Mrs. Doherty's death, in connection with this case."

"Callista never told you much about the Dohertys, either of them?"

"No, not much, until last July. Then she took me into her confidence about the episode with Doherty, which had ended then, or so she hoped."

"She said that? That she hoped the affair was ended?"

"Just that, as I recall. She showed me that letter from Doherty, the thing that was read in court, and then later--well, next morning in fact, she said: 'I hope it's over. I hope I'm done with the fever and the blindness.'"

It could be despair, that dullness in him like a bodily ache. The Judge found he was again studying faces on the jury. Emmet Hoag bored, half asleep by the look of him. Ancient Emerson Lake neither bored nor hostile, his gaze rigid, vaguely vulturine, apparently hypnotized by the swell of Edith Nolan's breast, under the tweed suit hardly more than hints of fullness and softness, but evidently enough to set an old man dreaming in his rank and lonely antiquity; would he be hearing what she said at all? Young LaSalle seemed indecisively friendly, Mr. Fielding remote behind an unreadable pallid front. The Beales woman studied Edith Nolan's green handbag, possibly wondering if it was a style that would suit herself. Mrs. Grant appeared grumpy; likely her bony frame was uncomfortable in the graceless seat of the jury box. The only faces of the entire jury that showed any positive liking for Edith Nolan were those of Helen Butler and Rachel Kleinman. He saw Dora Lagovski apparently submerged in moist daydream; recalled that when Callista's drawing had reached her he had seen the damp lips form (in merciful silence) the word "cute." Emerson Lake's jaw was now moving slightly, approximately in time with the mild rise and fall of Edith Nolan's breathing--damn the old buzzard. But what about himself, aged forty-seven and for the last few minutes intensely aware of Edith Nolan as a desirable woman? Weren't his own wits wandering?

So far as the Judge could see, Edith Nolan was doing nothing to flaunt her personal attractiveness. Probably to many eyes she would have none. Her make-up was not prominent, the tweed suit practically dowdy, her manner consistently simple and direct. If his wandering middle-aged eye wanted a tickling, why not choose an obvious pin-up type like the juror Dolores Acevedo? He forced himself to glance in that direction once again. The black-haired beauty was showing no more emotion at present than Mr. Fielding. Very lovely indeed; made more so by her position next to the sallow weediness of the schoolteacher Stella Wainwright. Lovely like a conventional painting, Acevedo--and no more disturbing. Her face blurred; the instant's involuntary motion of his eyes transformed it to another, also under black hair: but these were close-set curls, the face altogether different, not beautiful at all by common standards but rather homely, big-nosed, small-chinned, the eyes sea-blue and, not for the first time, frightening. "_It wasn't natural how men went crazy for her--not even pretty--any man, garage man, anything in pants...._"

That peevish outbreak from Maud Welsh had puzzled the Judge at the time. Now he could sense the quality in Callista that Maud Welsh had meant. Earlier perhaps he had been too intensely preoccupied with other aspects of the case and with his own situation as Judge, the lawyer and judge dominant, the male animal quiescent or at least temporarily locked up in the cellar. Yes, she had it, the quality sensed but not understood because understanding is a verbalizing process and there aren't any words for the electric something-or-other that will make men turn in desire toward one particular woman in a crowd, ignoring others who may be in a dozen ways prettier, more agreeable, more available. Callista had it. Edith Nolan, in her own totally different way, had it, at least for himself, perhaps not for most others. No: Maud Welsh wouldn't have been likely to make that remark about Miss Nolan. _Yes, they are wandering._

"Do you recall, Miss Nolan, what day it was that this conversation took place, about Doherty's letter?"

"Yes, it was the evening of Monday, July 6th, the same day Callista had received that letter."

"I'll ask you to tell the circumstances more fully in your own way."

"She telephoned me, that evening, soon after going home from my studio. Asked me to come over to Covent Street. Her voice sounded as it might if she'd been in physical pain. I went at once, and found her--well, dazed, sick, in shock you could call it. She'd been in one of her blue moods all week, I didn't know why. She held out that letter to me. I read the thing. I remember I told her she'd feel better if she could cry, or smash dishes, anything to break the tension that was making her sick. She did cry, the only time I've known her to do so. And told me about it. Everything, I think. Except at that time she didn't know she was pregnant--a few days past the period, not enough to signify. When she was able to talk she was much better, got things in proportion, summed it up quite realistically herself without my saying much. She'd loved him a while, the kind of infatuation any lonely and imaginative girl might experience; then when she most needed him he'd broken it off, and that was that."

"Objection! Irrelevant opinions."

"Objection overruled." Judge Mann reflected dourly on the legal unwisdom of what he was about to add, and added it: "It appears to the Court that the witness is concerned with matters of fact as she saw them, speaking to the best of her knowledge and belief." _Old buzzard, pint-size Emerson Lake in a black silk nightie, you wanted that startled blue-eyed glance, the warmth of it and the friendliness, and you knew you'd get it: consider whether that was why you spoke._

"Exception."

"Did Callista say anything to suggest she was thinking of suicide?"

"Two things, Mr. Warner, which I didn't understand at the time as I should have. When she was crying and hysterical, she said: 'I want my father, my father, I can't find out how to live without him.' Well, I knew he'd died away back when she was seven years old. Then later she said, twice I think: 'I wish I was dead.' That--oh, I took it to be simply an unthinking expression of grief and exhaustion. It seems to be a thing people say without considering quite what it means. I took it that way: alarming but not to be understood literally. But I think now, she meant it literally."

"You stayed with her a while, I suppose?"

"Yes, took her back to my place and made her go to bed there, gave her a sleeping pill. I played some hi-fi records, things she liked, until she fell asleep. In the morning she seemed to be in good command of herself, sense of humor restored anyway. That's when she said she hoped she was cured, and for a while I stopped worrying about other things she'd said."

"But only for a while?"

"Only for a while. During the following month, the rest of July, it was clear that things weren't right for her. Not herself. Deep abstractions for instance, when she wouldn't answer because she really didn't hear. Normally with me she's completely courteous, wouldn't dream of ignoring a question if she heard it. In July she was slipping down into the bluest of blue moods, and I couldn't reach her. I wondered about pregnancy because of what she'd told me, and asked her about it, I guess a week after she'd first told me the situation. She said: 'Oh, I'm all right.' Mistakenly, I took that to mean she'd had the delayed period. Either she answered evasively, which isn't like her, or she didn't understand my question. The last, I think. I think she was in such a faraway mood it was hard for her to get hold of what people said."

"Did she say any more, that month, about suicide?"

"Indirectly, yes. One evening we got into a sort of general talk, just kicking ideas around. She said some individuals are deficient in the will to live; living is desiring, she said, and such people don't desire strongly enough for a complete effort to stay alive. Well--something in it if you're speaking of certain pathological cases--catatonics I think the doctors call them--patients who just lie around, won't eat or even move, a kind of death in life. But that's so far from anything in Callista's make-up, I couldn't believe she was talking indirectly about herself. She said not all zombis are in the psychopathic hospitals. Later--this did alarm me--she remarked that she'd have no problems worth mentioning if she could discover any purpose in existence. A depressive remark, certainly. She wouldn't have said it if she hadn't felt she was losing her hold on things, losing her interest in living--and if I understand it correctly, Mr. Warner, that loss of interest is the danger sign. People can talk a lot about killing themselves, and nothing happens. But if the interest in living goes--"

"Objection! This is exactly the sort of thing I was afraid of, your Honor. I don't care what she calls it, Miss Nolan is now lecturing us like a professional psychiatrist, and I object."

"Overruled." _I believe I snapped; the rumble on the left is the noise of calf-bound law books revolving in the grave._ "The Court has not received the impression that the witness is claiming any professional standing in psychiatry. The remark you object to, Mr. Hunter, was a general one, to be sure; but she was speaking of matters that are either common knowledge or ought to be. I must rule that the defense is within its rights to let her follow this line, to help clarify her testimony on matters of fact." _And where in the pluperfect hell do I dig up a precedent on that one?_

"Exception."

"Yes. You may complete what you were saying, Miss Nolan."

"If the interest in living is gone--I mean the simple wish to stay alive and see what will happen next--then I think there's real danger of a suicide. And as the Judge said, Mr. Warner, I guess that's pretty much common knowledge. Callista herself was certainly aware of it, from her reading, her general education. Well, that remark about discovering any purpose in existence--I caught Callista up on that, I remember. I reminded her that we make and choose our own purposes--" (_Watch it, Red!_)--"so far as we know them." She understood the danger, probably, the risk of touching on any questions that, for most of the jury, were settled on Sunday morning and decently ignored the rest of the week. "She--thought about that, I'm sure, and for a while I think she came part way out of her depression. Not all the way."

"Summing up then, Miss Nolan: knowing her as you do, and seeing her, I suppose, every week-day during last July--you're convinced that most of that time she was behaving like one in the grip of a serious depression with the possibility of suicide?"

"I don't have any doubt of it, Mr. Warner--now. I ought not to have been in doubt at the time. If anyone is guilty in this case it's myself, because I ought to have stayed with her just about every minute until she won her way out of that mood. Then there would have been no chance for the horrible accident that makes it possible to charge her with--"

"Objection!"

"Objection sustained." She looked up with understanding and no reproach. The man in private applauded her doubtless intentional violation of rules, while the Judge must condemn. "The witness's answer will have to be stricken." _It comes to me, I did not add that the jury is to disregard it. That all right, Red?_

"Miss Nolan, I understand you weren't present at a certain picnic in Shanesville last August 7th. Did you know about it at the time?"

"Yes. I closed the studio that afternoon--the weather was impossibly hot. Cal said her mother was having one of her picnics, and thought she might go. Cal didn't ordinarily care for that sort of thing, but I--oh, I guess I just told her to run along and have a good time."

"Did Callista speak later of seeing the Dohertys at that picnic?"

"Yes, Monday. All she said was that they were there, and she hadn't talked with either of them. I asked if she was--cured, and she said: 'Oh, Edith, I can't talk about it yet, I can't.' I had to let it go at that. All that week she was very blue. She was working hard--too hard; volunteered to straighten out some of my records. Afraid to relax, maybe."

"When did you last see Callista before her arrest?"

"Friday, August 14th, when she left the studio after work."

"What did her mood seem to be at that time?"

"Tired, unhappy, withdrawn--but maybe a little more composed. I knew that, left to herself and barring unforeseeable accidents, she'd find good and reasonable answers to her troubles, but--Mr. Warner, it's strangely difficult to help anyone you love."

"Did you talk to her on the phone that week end any time?"

"Yes, late Sunday afternoon, the 16th. My father was in town that day, a flying visit, unexpected. Callista had never met him. I wanted her to. I called her late in the afternoon, past 5:30 I think--to ask if she'd like to come over in the evening. She said she might, but there was something she had engaged to do first. She sounded very much better. Not happy, but--calm anyhow. She didn't say what the engagement was, and didn't make it sound like anything too important. It could have been a reference to Mrs. Doherty's coming to see her--I mean, nothing Callista said was inconsistent with that. She could hardly have talked to me as calmly, almost cheerfully, as she did, if she'd still been overwrought or--or had known she was heading toward something disastrous."

"When she didn't come to meet your father, did you call her?"

"Tried to, a little after nine--that would have been when she was out in Shanesville, according to what she told the District Attorney. I wasn't worried when she didn't show up, just supposed that something had delayed her until too late, and that she'd bring me up to date when I saw her Monday."

"What was her usual time for coming to work in the morning?"

"Any time before ten was all right with me. That Monday, August 17th, she telephoned me at about ten and said she was sick. Her voice was completely changed: flat, dead. I asked of course what was wrong. She said in the same tone, without hesitation: 'I've been pregnant since June and last night I had a miscarriage.' I told her I'd come over as soon as I could get rid of a client who was waiting in the studio. She said then in a very distressed way: 'No no, Edith, please don't!' She insisted she was all right, and then for a moment or two she was almost incoherent, saying she--oh, refused to drag me into her troubles, things like that. I said nonsense, I was her friend and that's what friends are for. Finally I asked if there was anyone with her, and she said no, but there would be presently. I thought she meant her mother or maybe her stepfather or both--she didn't say so, it was just one of those mistaken impressions you get under stress."

"You didn't go over?"

"No, sir. I thought that if Mrs. Chalmers was there I'd likely just be crashing in and doing more harm than good. I called again, later. Busy signals. When I finally got through, about one-thirty, the phone was answered by some policeman who asked me a few dozen questions and was finally willing to tell me that Miss Blake had been detained for questioning on a certain matter, as he called it, and was at the courthouse, at Mr. Lamson's office."

"Who was that policeman, if you recall?"

"Gage or some such name."

_One for the Chief of Detectives. The Judge will not smile. There is no reason to smile._

"Did you then go to the District Attorney's office, Miss Nolan?"

"Yes."

"Were you given any information about your friend?"

"No, sir, just a brush-off from some clerk. That's when I started trying to call you, Mr. Warner."

"Yes. I have only one or two more questions, Miss Nolan. Did Callista ever express to you any hostility toward Ann Doherty?"

"Never. I recall that she spoke of her several times, but never with hostility or resentment or anything suggesting jealousy. No exaggerated friendliness either. I got the impression they were--acquaintances."

"Well, for that matter, did you ever hear Callista speak maliciously about anyone?"

"Never."

II

"Your witness, Mr. Hunter."

Edith Nolan thought with an edge of panic: _Is that all, Cecil?_ The Old Man's face was saying a kind of good-bye to her, turning away, not apparently displeased or disappointed--satisfied rather, so far as one could hope to read a face that must also be presenting a front to the gaze of the jury. But there was so much more that ought to have been said! The intimate truths of personality, relation, individual quality, that become no longer small once your vision is clear enough to separate the general from the specific, to see the primary core of self and the universe its matrix at one and the same time, neither too much distorted. It seemed to Edith that she had hardly begun to talk to those twelve, who were certainly not all dull, not all hostile.

Was there, for example, no way at all to explain that Callista had a comic brown mole near her navel, that when she was absorbed in reading her left forefinger twisted a black curl above her ear, always the same curl, the same small motion--and that these facts, alone and of themselves, were reasons as great, valid, finally convincing, as any of the other reasons why she must not be slain?

Still it was not, ultimately, a question of explaining anything, of offering facts to twelve other minds with the assumption that they could view them as you did. They could not. If it isn't in nature for two pairs of eyes ever to observe a simple physical object in quite the same manner, how grotesque to expect twelve minds to agree, or even approximate agreement, in the consideration of an abstract idea! What was needed, she thought, was that twelve minds should learn (here and now and very quickly) a type of humility in the face of the unknown that even the strongest and best schooled intelligences found it hard to achieve with study and leisure and every advantage of the past's accumulated resources. Unknown indeed--these people knew nothing of Callista Blake. They never could, in the nature of things, know much, never acquire more than a brief distorted glimpse of her, and that under conditions so outrageously far from the daily norm that her actual self appeared to them as no more than the flicker of a shadow. The kindly and badly troubled little man up there on the bench knew far more about her than they did, simply because he was trained to observation and the disciplines of independent thought; and he knew only a trifle. _How little I know myself, or ever will know!_

She controlled her face to the semblance of tranquillity. The long-jawed man had arrived with his athletic grace, a foot raised comfortably on the platform that elevated the witness chair, his charcoal-gray suit just right for the occasion, neat and grave like a uniform. At close range, Edith noticed his expression was not particularly cold or severe. His eyes were thoughtful, his features betrayed no ugly tension. What is cruelty anyway, and how do you read it in another? It seemed to be present like an occasional tic (but might not really be) in the vacuous face of that oaf Hoag in the front row of the jury box. But in T. J. Hunter? At the moment he looked like a solemn salesman about to give her a well-spoken pitch, say on insurance or a middle-priced car.

"You would do virtually anything, would you not, for your friend Callista Blake?"

"The best thing I can do for her is tell the truth about her and about these events, so far as I know it, and that I've done."

"Your answer is not quite responsive, Miss Nolan."

"I think it is, but I'll be more specific if you wish. I would not commit crimes for Callista Blake or any other friend, if only because in the long run you do your friend no service that way--compounding wrong things instead of lessening them. And I would not lie for her on any important matter, because it happens the truth is best for her as well as for me."

"That's quite a pragmatic attitude, isn't it?"

_My, the high intellectual plane!_ "Naturalistic might be a better word, Mr. District Attorney, but pragmatic if you like. If an ethical principle isn't at least theoretically practical in human affairs, I'd rather leave it in the books."

"I see your point." _If only you did!_ "You wouldn't kill in defense of Callista Blake?"

"Why, I might. If it's a clear case of protecting a friend's life, the law generally calls it justifiable homicide, doesn't it?"

"But for you it would have to be a clear case, is that right? I mean, you're referring to something on the level of shooting a burglar to protect the household, something like that?"

"I suppose so. I've never encountered any situation like that, so I really can't predict how I'd behave."

"Let me make sure I understand your position, Miss Nolan. You do not believe in absolute ethical principles?"

"Before I can answer that I must have your personal definition of the word 'absolute'."

"You must be familiar with the term, are you not?"

"Yes, but there would be at least five or six definitions of it in any unabridged dictionary, and I can't know which one you have in mind unless you tell me."

"Well, I had in mind the meaning which I think is generally used in philosophical discussions: self-contained, self-dependent, ultimate, in other words free from the limitations of human error, human perception."

"Thank you." _He is a shade tougher than I thought._ "In that case the answer would have to be that ethical principles are human achievements, human ways of thinking and acting, and I don't see how a human activity can ever be free from the limitations of human error and human perception."

"Very plausible. I see you've done quite a bit of thinking along these lines. That is what you mean by what you called a--a naturalistic attitude, I think that was your term?"

"In part, yes."

"Oh, there's more?"

"As a well-read man, Mr. Hunter, you must know that the conception of naturalistic ethics is at least as old as Confucius, that libraries have been filled with it, and that we could talk here on the subject until the end of next year with a great deal left unsaid."

"Well, I'm afraid there might be a fatigue factor."

"There might indeed." _Was I quick enough to steal some of that applause of witless laughter?_ "It would take quite a while just to find a little agreement on definitions and first premises."

"Maybe." He looked downright friendly, she thought, until you noticed the rigid watchfulness. His smile was comfortable; he probably felt that the rumble of amusement was, on the whole, one for his side. It probably was. She risked a glance toward the jury. Most of them looked puzzled, but none really irritated except little Mr. Anson; Flint-face Fielding seemed coldly interested, but whether in a favorable or hostile way there was no telling. In Helen Butler Edith saw a tiny flicker, surely friendliness, as their eyes met for an instant. It might mean recognition and memory, but if Miss Butler had any thought of disqualifying herself because of a trivial meeting months ago when they had not even exchanged names, she would surely have done it already. _Best not look at her again._ "I think, Miss Nolan, I'd better go back to my original question. I gave you my definition of 'absolute,' you remember, and you said--which sounded reasonable to me--that human activity can't very well be free from human error. Now, may I take that as a positive no to my earlier question: you do not believe in absolute ethical principles?"

"Not quite, Mr. Hunter. Some ethical principles take on the apparent quality of absolutes, or of universal law, simply because virtually all the members of a society endorse them. In other words we act as if those principles were absolutes, whether we can justify it logically or not. So let me put it this way: I believe in following certain ethical principles as strictly as though they had the nature of universal law, so long as my own conscience, my own intelligence, can agree to it."

"I see. But that means, doesn't it, that your conscience is actually, to you, the supreme judge?"

"In a sense it has to be."

"For example," said Judge Mann suddenly, and Edith turned to him feeling as though he had reached out a hand to aid her in crossing slippery rocks above a torrent--"for example, if an individual accepts the orders or doctrines of an external authority, would you agree, Miss Nolan, that his acceptance is itself an act of his own conscience, or will, or intelligence?"

"Yes, your Honor, that expresses what I had in mind."

The Judge said: "In fact the individual can have no dealings, no contact with ideas or doctrines or even with simple observation of the physical world, unless there is first a positive action of his own intelligence. Is this still in line with your thought, Miss Nolan?"

"Yes, your Honor."

"And--I'll be done in a moment, Mr. Hunter--and finally, would you agree, Miss Nolan, that this decidedly elementary fact is often overlooked in our everyday thinking, perhaps because it's so obvious that we aren't willing to give it a second glance or work out its implications?"

"I believe so. We accept the fact the way animals accept the air they breathe, and with no more thought."

"Yes," said Judge Mann, his gaze leaving her, maybe reluctantly, as he scribbled something on his note-pad, "life was breathing air a good many million years before a fairly advanced science noticed that air was a mixture of different gases, had weight and mass, other properties. Well, go on, Mr. Hunter."

Edith thought: _Maybe that'll larn him._ And over there beside her friend, the Old Man's dark eyes were watching, saying as plainly as eyes could say it that he was pleased with her, and that he was profoundly frightened.

"I've enjoyed this little excursion into philosophy, Miss Nolan, and I'm glad his Honor lent us a hand with it--'way over my depth, I'm afraid--but now I suppose we'd better get back to the facts. Well, one thing first: am I right in supposing that in your view, this--this act of acceptance, I think you called it, has to happen first before one is even allowed to believe in a Supreme Being?"

She could not help glancing toward the Judge, who was watching the prosecutor, coldly intent and unjudicially angry. The corner of her eye gave her the solemn approving nod of the juror Emma Beales, the sudden relaxation--_everything's all right, boys_--in the foreman Peter Anson. She understood that Judge Mann was waiting for her. "Mr. Hunter, I also enjoyed that excursion into philosophy, but unless the Court rules it's relevant, I will not discuss my views on religion with you."

"They are not relevant to the case," said Judge Mann, "and the witness is not required to answer."

Hunter nodded politely. "I've certainly no wish to press the point. But may I ask--and by the way, I won't urge you to respond to this question either if you'd rather not--may I ask, Miss Nolan, whether you're willing to state the reasons for your refusal to answer?"

"Quite willing. Religion is a topic that too easily stirs up a lot of emotion if there's any serious discussion or conflict of opinion. I assume the members of the jury belong to more than one religious faith. Some of them might share my views, others might be offended by them--I can't tell. But since religion, so far as I can see, has absolutely nothing to do with the guilt or innocence of my friend, I think it would make no sense anyhow for me to get into the subject."

The Old Man over there nodded slightly, maybe a kind of cheering, a way of saying his gal Red could take care of herself. _But can I?_

"That's reasonable," said T. J. Hunter almost affectionately. "You're right it's a touchy topic, right also that it has no direct bearing on the question of guilt or innocence; and I'm as anxious as you are to avoid stirring up needless emotions or side issues. The only thing I do wish I could get at along this line--my only reason for speaking of it at all--well, Miss Nolan, if you have no unqualified belief in absolute ethical principles, and if a question about belief in God is merely distasteful to you, don't you think that might have some slight bearing on your credibility as a witness in a murder trial?"

The Old Man was standing up, his voice slow in coming, slow-moving when it came as if each word must force its way past an obstacle in his throat: "Mr. Hunter, that is vicious and contemptible."

And before stage anger took control of the handsome mask with the shovel chin, Edith glimpsed the fact that T. J. Hunter was at last genuinely pleased about something. "I must ask you to watch your choice of language, Counselor."

"No more of this," said Judge Mann. "The attention of both counsel, please. Your question, Mr. Hunter, was entirely out of order, because it implied that a person with independent views on religion has a lower regard for the truth than others--an implication with no slightest basis in fact or logic. From her answers, her manner, her educational background, there is every reason to suppose that Miss Nolan has quite as high a regard for the truth as anyone else who has testified in this case. You will withdraw your question. Mr. Warner, your remark to the prosecutor was ill-chosen and unparliamentary. It calls for an apology to him, I think."

Hunter spoke gently: "I withdraw my question."

"Mr. Hunter," said the Old Man wearily, "I was influenced by personal feeling as I should not have been, and my words were ill-chosen. My apology, sir, if you can find it acceptable."

Very gently, Hunter said: "Why, of course, Cecil." And more gently still: "I will ask no further questions of this witness."

She stood up, dizzy. Some passage of words between Cecil and the Judge. Redirect examination--there would be none. She heard the Judge say after an impatient throat-clearing that she was excused, and through a sudden maddening colorless blur she saw or imagined that Cecil was achieving a sort of smile for her. She stepped down carefully, concentrated on preventing her fingers from reaching after a handkerchief or rising toward her face. If she could keep her head turned away from the jury, they might not see. Her seat was over there somewhere, beyond the bald skull of the fattest reporter at the press tables. Cecil was still smiling, more or less.

_But I lost. I lost._

_Callista, what have I done to you?_

III

Callista thought: _I am stronger than she is, and never knew it before. Why is she crying, after she was so wonderful?_

It was no trick of vision; no mistaking the intrusive brilliant glitter on her cheeks as Edith stepped down and walked rather clumsily--but head high--toward her seat. She would not retire in any sniffling droop: rather, Callista knew, she would be furious at the weakness, and maybe not reach for a handkerchief even when she was clear of the arena but keep her head high and angrily observant, let the sparkle dry on her face and stay there, the hell with it. _But I am much stronger. I can hold up too, even better. I won't let hunter-Hunter trick me into saying anything he can use. I'll play the act to the limit. For Cecil. For Edith. For myself. And isn't it time now?_

Yes, it was time. Cecil was whispering to her. Watching Edith still, ready with a smile if Edith would only look her way, Callista lost his words and had to ask him to repeat. "I'm putting you on now. Feeling all right, Cal? Steady?"

"I'm fine, Bud. Steady. Let 'em all come." It occurred to her that she really did feel in excellent condition. This was the end of the long affliction of waiting, mute listening, anticipation: now at least she could attempt to do something. Cecil rose and moved away; he was up there near the witness stand, calling her name, smiling a little--_Himself, not like my father. It is time. First to Mr.-Delehanty-which-is-the-Clerk._

At close range Mr. Delehanty's eyes appeared curiously vacant. She found a moment's fantastic pleasure in proposing to herself that the poor guy might actually have died long ago, leaving a fruity voice, a magnificent suit of clothes, and some structure (partly plastic?) designed to hold the two together world without end. The arm mechanism must be especially clever, to carry on that Bible routine. She held her hands at her sides, and before the melodious rumble (a concealed recording?) could start, she spoke quickly as she had rehearsed herself last night while Matron Kowalski was playing the usual games with that light bulb in the corridor: "I affirm that I will tell the truth, the whole truth so far as I know it, and nothing but the truth."

At the corner of her eye she glimpsed Cecil's stricken look, and thought: _Oh yes yes, I should have warned him._ Her thought continued with an irritation which love somehow magnified instead of diminishing: _What's the matter anyhow? Must we be so timid? They're not going to condemn me for such a thing as that. Are they?_

Mr. Delehanty made an indeterminate fogbound noise.

Judge Mann said evenly: "The oath is binding in that form--should there be a question in anyone's mind. The witness is exercising a constitutional privilege which ought to be familiar to everyone." She felt he would have liked to speak to her directly, humanly. Instead he turned to the still faintly resonating Delehanty and remarked in a casual undertone too low for the jury's hearing but not for hers: "You might be interested to know, Mr. Delehanty, that I chose to affirm when I took the oath as a justice." _You were not actually speaking to that-which-is-the-Clerk--I heard and I'm grateful._ "You may take the stand now, Miss Blake."

They were trying to help her. Cecil, Edith, now Judge Mann who, as Cecil said, had tried all along to give her every break--tried too much for his own good, maybe, and hers too. She understood that he not only desired to help her: he _saw_ her.

Her mind grew dizzy, shifted, retreated, sought to steady itself, reason and unreason quarreling within. Were they, the three of them, treating her as they might treat a difficult child? She fought down the illogical resentment, despising it, conquering it--almost. She was seated, the ungainly witness chair still warm from Edith's body. How different the courtroom looked from up here! A whole new orientation. Just look, for instance, at that big slob in the back row smuggling a candy bar up to the pink slot in his shiny face. Had that operation been going on since Monday morning? _Look, Daddy! Is he s'posed to eat in here, Daddy, is he s'posed to, huh, Daddy?_

The jury too. (_Where's Jimmy?_) The jury was closer, much closer. She could smell them. One of the females gave off a powerful tuberose reek, variable as drafts in the large room stirred it about. (_Where's Jimmy, if it matters?_) Callista decided the smell was generated by the Lagovski, probably in heat. Any minute now--well, Emerson Lake was the biggest, but pretty old; maybe one of the more vigorous younger males--

"Callista--" _Please stand near me always!_--"you're a resident of Winchester, aren't you?"

"Yes, sir. 21 Covent Street."

"You've kept that apartment?"

"Oh yes. Edith Nolan is taking care of it for me."

"Ought to be back there in a few days." _How do you do it, Cecil, that casualness? You're hurting inside worse than I am. I feel fine._ "You were attentive to all of Miss Nolan's testimony, weren't you?"

"Yes, I was, Mr. Warner."

"Before we go on to other things, is there anything in that testimony that you want to comment on, or add to, maybe?"

_You told me, give them modesty. "Every one of them knows, Cal, that you're in their power. Think what that does to twelve human egos, and show them the respect they believe they deserve. In fact don't just show it: try to make yourself feel it." I will give them modesty, Cecil._ "I think she overrated me as an artist, Mr. Warner. It's her honest view, I know, but I'm not that good." _Who knows for sure? Maybe I am._

"Well, as you know, I set a very high value on your work myself." His quick relaxed smile was including the jury somehow. _Wish I could do that._ Or some of the jury: his glance had been directed, she thought, toward the crinkle-faced middle-aged lady. _Name?--Butler, Miss Helen Butler._ Callista ventured to meet the woman's eyes, did so, and was frightened to realize that for the instant's duration she was not certain what her own facial muscles were doing. _What did I actually do?--make a face?_ Surely there had been a gleam like friendliness in Helen Butler; just as surely, the woman was now looking down at her hands, and away across the room, troubled but otherwise communicating nothing at all. "However, Callista, I was thinking chiefly of other things Miss Nolan said--for instance her belief that you might have been experiencing a serious depression, perhaps suicidal, last July and part of August. Was she right, Callista? Were you at that time, or any part of that time, actually contemplating doing away with yourself?"

"Yes, I--yes, I was."

"It was a definite intention, my dear?"

"For a while, yes. It wasn't so until I happened to see those plants in my mother's garden. Maybe not too definite even then. I only thought: this would be one way. Then I was thinking, why not take a few, have them on hand if things got worse? Then I was actually taking them, breaking off the tops and shoving them away in the tall grass, keeping the roots."

"But I presume you must have been working up to that state of mind for quite a while?"

"Yes, I had been. It was like a progressive illness--well, I suppose that's what it really is. Each day a little emptier than the one before, a little harder to care about anything."

"You made that infusion of the roots in brandy?"

"Yes, the next day."

"Do you recall the circumstances--what part of the day it was, say?"

"It was evening, after I'd stopped trying to write that letter--the one I didn't finish, didn't mail."

"You gave up entirely on that letter, didn't you?--I mean, you decided it couldn't do any good?"

"Oh, that's true. I was imagining communication when--when in the nature of things there just couldn't be any. Jimmy--Jim Doherty and I never really--never _saw_ each other, never heard--"

"Callista, I'm not sure the jury--it's a difficult thing to express."

"I know, Mr. Warner, and I'm doing it badly. Well--sometimes a person can get rid of the self-preoccupation long enough to really _know_ someone else, without illusion or pretense. It's like that with Edith Nolan and me. We--communicate. But with Jimmy--with Jim Doherty and me it was all illusion. On both sides. And I gave up on that letter because I realized rather suddenly that I was--talking to someone who wasn't there." (_And he isn't here in the courtroom--he is--it doesn't matter._) "You asked something else--oh, about the monkshood. Yes, I made the infusion that night, and then pushed it away to the back of the shelf. I don't know how to tell this either, Mr. Warner. There's a fascination about an ugly and foolish thing like that. I don't understand it: it takes hold of you in spite of yourself. I remember I almost poured out a drink from it, that night, simply from a sort of curiosity, and then I thought--this is going to sound idiotic--"

"Never mind, just tell it as it comes to you."

"Well, I thought: Look, Callista, if you can be interested and curious about a miserable thing like this, maybe you could be interested in better things. After a while if not now. So don't drink it. And I didn't of course--I just pushed it to the back of the shelf and--oh, I read that evening, I think. Some book or other. It didn't hold me, I wasn't quite alive, but it was something to do. That Saturday evening after the picnic was probably the time I came nearest to actually drinking the stuff."

"I see. A week later, Callista--I mean Sunday, August 16th--did you telephone to Ann Doherty?"

"Yes, early in the afternoon."

"You wanted to reach her and not Jim, is that right?"

"Yes. If Jimmy had answered the phone, I don't know--I suppose everything would be different, wouldn't it? I wasn't prepared to talk to him then. Maybe I'd've hung up without speaking. Anyway Ann did answer, and I--asked her over."

"Did you say why you wanted to see her?"

"No, I--hadn't quite braced myself up to telling her the situation. I kept it to small talk, on the phone. She sounded very friendly--well, she always did. She happened to mention that Jimmy had gone to New York for overnight, and that's when I asked if she'd come over--said I wanted to talk to her about something. I don't suppose I made it sound important--as I say, I hadn't fully made up my mind about telling her anything."

"Were you in a different mood that day, Callista?"

"Very different. Some other things--nothing to do with Jimmy, or with Ann--had been sort of cleaned up for me, the night before." As she spoke, Callista was meeting her mother's gaze across the courtroom for the first time that day. Her words had no visible effect on the fixed pose of sad quiet, the dignity of the rejected Mother deeply wronged. Callista deduced that the Face of The Mother was saying: "_You see how it is: I her Mother am not even allowed to testify._" "I'm not sure, Mr. Warner, if it's what you call relevant."

"Well, Callista, your mood, your state of mind at that time, is certainly relevant in the ordinary sense. Legally, the question of relevance gets difficult when we're dealing with subjective matters. If I correctly understand the rulings during previous testimony, the Court is taking a generous and realistic attitude on this question. The nature of the case demands it, since, as I said in my opening words, we are not contesting most of the circumstantial evidence. Subject to correction by the Court, Callista, I'll leave it to you whether you think that a mention of what happened the night before would help the jury understand your situation. If you feel it would, go ahead and tell it, and we can check you if it seems to be going too far afield."

"I think it might help to explain things. But I'll leave out the details--they don't matter." _By the way, Mrs. Chalmers, I'm your daughter--remember? They tell me I'm on trial for murder._ "It had to do with my relation to my mother, Mr. Warner. There had been some--tensions between us for quite a while, and that Saturday evening--it was the 15th, wasn't it?--yes--we sort of cleared it up. In a way." _Mrs. Chalmers, Mrs. Herbert Chalmers, I am about to smile at you, toward you anyway. Will it make any difference?_ "You remember, sir--Miss Welsh testified about my going out to Shanesville that Saturday evening, and how bad-mannered I was--and I don't doubt I was too, I can be pretty stupid--call it a one-track mind. Though it's a fact I just didn't know Ann Doherty was there on the porch, until Miss Welsh testified to it. She must have been back in the shadows, I suppose, and I was thinking so hard about what I wanted to talk over with my mother that I didn't hear her speak." Callista felt her lips curve. It was surely a smile; she meant it for a smile. "I guess I was in a fog." Yes, fog--as inexorably as deepening fog, the realization came over Callista that Mrs. Victoria Johnson Blake Chalmers was quite simply not listening. Present in the courtroom, knowing at least as well as most of the other spectators the general story of what was going on down here in the arena; but not listening. Mrs. Chalmers was maintaining a Face; a very necessary thing to do. She would have been perfectly willing to smile back, Callista guessed, if she could have divided her attention, listened just enough to understand that it might be appropriate, right now, for the Face to smile. "So I went indoors to--see my mother, and we--talked." Fog--words pushed into fog move sluggishly, as if through pain.

"Miss Welsh also testified to overhearing a few things. Was that testimony accurate, Callista?"

"Oh, reasonably, so far as Miss Welsh knew, I'm sure. Mother was crying a little at one time, and I guess I did quote something or other from Shakespeare. I was sort of making a fool of myself." _Ten minutes from now, Mother, will it dawn on you what I said? You see, I haven't a notion what I'll be saying ten minutes from now. By the way, Mama, I don't see Cousin Maud. Is she home with the Plum Jam?_ "What Miss Welsh didn't hear, couldn't very well know, Mr. Warner, was that at the end we did get things sort of cleared up." _All right, stranger--no smile, just sad maternal forgiveness. One of Callie's little emotional upsets, you know--children are SO difficult!_ "And--here's why I thought it might not be out of place to mention it--that evening, that's when the suicidal depression left me. I wanted to live again. After I'd--said good-night to Mother." _Mama darling, why don't you lean over the rail, ask that fat guy at the press table, the bald one who looks intelligent--I think he'll tell you this is a murder trial. They're trying the funny-looking broad with the gimp leg._

"It left you suddenly, Callista, the depression? Like the end of a sickness?"

"Yes." _Cecil, I love you._ "Yes, it was very much like that, Mr. Warner. Like coming out of a fever, or pain all at once ending. There was--too much upswing also, I guess you might call it. I was back with some of my illusions. I mean the illusions about Jimmy. I'd once more talked myself into imagining there might be--you know, a separation, what I'd been trying to write Jimmy about in that letter I never mailed. Most of the day, and even while I was talking with Ann on the phone, I was able to fool myself with that. Self-deception, it's like walking a tightrope, I guess: so long as you don't look down at the _fact_ of the ground a long way below, you can truly believe there's no danger, you're just walking. I think that all that day, until Ann came, I was--living inside of that illusion. Wanting something so much I couldn't see how ridiculous it was to expect it." _Look, Mother: I know I hurt you plenty of times. I was always nasty and hellishly difficult until I escaped from Shanesville and from you--but I never hurt you THAT much._

"I think now, Callista, you might go ahead and tell, in your own way, everything that happened that Sunday evening and night. I realize you'll be mostly repeating what you told Mr. Lamson last August, but I believe the jury wants to hear it direct from you, so--so just go ahead, my dear--take your time, try to remember everything important."

_Don't be scared, Cecil. Yes, I know: this is it._ "Ann came to my apartment about quarter to eight, Mr. Warner. I can't bring back the early part of the conversation too well, except I know it was nothing important. Just usual comments on the weather, I guess--it was a very hot evening, sticky hot. Her suit--the powder-blue--it was summer weight of course, but I remember it looked sort of warm, I think I asked something silly about how could she stand wearing even the jacket in such weather, and--Mr. Warner, do I understand it right, that I shouldn't repeat any of the things she said? It seems reasonable that I shouldn't--after all, Ann's not here to set me right if I misquoted her."

"That's how it is, Callista. I'm sure you understand it. Just tell your own side of it--what you did, what you observed, what happened."

"Yes, I'll try. There was that small talk for ten minutes or so, and then I was going ahead, very clumsily I guess, telling her about--Jimmy and me. Oh, wait, one thing--I remember that at the start, when she'd just arrived, I was going to offer her a drink, and I didn't because I had a sort of half-memory that she didn't take alcohol. A mistaken memory--likely had her tastes confused with someone else's--but I know that was in my mind, that's why I didn't offer her one." _Cecil, I just invented this: is it any damn good?_

Apparently he was not displeased. "You didn't offer her a drink then or any time, is that right?"

"That's right. You see, I--Ann Doherty and I were never really very well acquainted. I knew the Dohertys as neighbors of course, from the time they moved in there, but my mother and stepfather saw much more of them than I ever did. I can't say I really knew Jimmy, either, I--" (_Cecil, please give me a lift with this one_)--"well, I said something like that before, didn't I?"

"The episode with him was--really no more than that, an episode?"

"Midsummer madness. I must have been ready to go overboard for someone. It was chance we happened to meet, that May-day." _Handkerchief back in the sleeve, girl--let the palms stay wet, wouldn't look good to be wiping them._ "And things got out of control. So far as the affair is concerned, Mr. Warner, if there's any question of blame or responsibility, I'll take it. Nothing could have started if I hadn't allowed it. And Jimmy--well, I can't speak for him, but I know he didn't realize until much later how terribly important I'd let it become to me, for a while. He just slipped, but I went all the way over, head over heels, for a while, and nobody to blame but myself." (_Give me that look, won't you?--the Cecil Warner special. Tell me I'm doing all right._) "Then later when he did understand how I was making such a thing of it--well, poor Jimmy, he's not an unkind person and never would be, he was in a spot, I think. He couldn't bear to hurt Ann or me either, and couldn't do anything at all without hurting one of us. I don't know what he could possibly have done except what he did--break off the relation and let time take care of it." (_Did the jury see him go? I didn't. Here at the start of the day, that I know._) "Do I need to say any more about this, Mr. Warner?"

"I don't think so. You're free to of course, if anything else occurs to you later. Do you want to get back to the Sunday evening now?"

"Yes." _Mother's gone too, behind the Face--but that happened a long time ago. And Cousin Maud with the Plum Jam, I hope. What's the matter, you nice people--isn't the Monkshood Girl putting on a good show? Herb--shall I project the voice at you, Herb?_ "Where was I?"

"You'd spoken of starting to tell Ann Doherty about it."

"Yes. I tried to do it reasonably, but I think all I did was blurt one hint after another until she--understood. She did, I know--that is, she understood what had been happening. As I think I told Mr. Lamson, I didn't get as far as telling her I was pregnant. I got the other facts said, somehow or other, and she--said something that showed she understood, and then I was suddenly sick to my stomach."

"She didn't appear angry?"

"No, Mr. Warner. I believe--I believe what I said could have been taken to mean that the thing was completely ended. Of course I've no way of knowing if that's what she thought. She wasn't angry. And then my sickness, coming like that, confused everything else. I ran for the bathroom. I know Ann was sorry for me, trying to help. I was--call it hysterical. I yelled at her, couldn't stand the idea of her touching me while I was sick, only wanted her to go away. But she wouldn't, so I ran from her again, into my bedroom, and I locked the door." (_Help me now!_) "Yes, I know I locked the door."

"That part is a perfectly clear memory, Callista? The physical act of turning the key or throwing the latch or whatever it was?"

"Yes. Old-fashioned key--why, I probably never had used it before, no occasion to. But I did then. I threw myself down on the bed. My throat was still raw and sour from vomiting, I remember that."

"Now you told Mr. Lamson that there's a stretch of a few minutes, in the bedroom, that won't quite come back. I take it for granted that since then you've been trying to fill in that gap in memory. Suppose I put it this way, Callista: is it possible now for you to add anything to what you told Mr. Lamson that day in his office?"

_Not quite a direct lie required--thanks, friend. Not that it matters, direct or indirect. The letter killeth--inner Puritan, drop dead, drop dead!_ "No, Mr. Warner--as you say, I've tried ever since to clear up that part in my mind, but--I can't add anything now." _I don't dare look toward a certain flinty intelligent face--the name is Francis Fielding--and yet I'll do it._

He was very quiet, Mr. Fielding, alert, interested; no change or wavering in his smart bird-like eyes as she met their probing and tried briefly, unavailingly, to win a glimpse of the self behind them. _Once I watched a heron in my famous field glasses, motionless at the edge of a stream. Motionless, hunting motionless._ That had been only the summer before last, a trip alone in the Volks to the hill country. More of the day came back, a good day and the summer hush. Eighteen. The heron had remained a somber painted image until the frog returned to the bank; then he got his meal: too large a frog to swallow whole, so he knocked it to pieces against a rock and resumed his stillness. But Cecil was speaking.

"I'll make a suggestion, Callista--a sort of hypothetical question, though I won't try to phrase it in precisely that form. Before you broke away and went into your bedroom you'd been, as you say, hysterical, sick, nauseated: too early for ordinary morning sickness I suppose, but the pregnancy must have had at least some influence on your condition. And you had undergone, were still undergoing, an intense emotional strain: the anticipation, the build-up to your interview with Mrs. Doherty, then sudden realization that it was wasted effort. Now I suggest that all those things coming together at once might have produced a plain old-fashioned fainting spell, a blackout from exhaustion. And I'll ask: is everything you remember about those moments consistent with that? It makes sense to you, that this could be what happened?"

_Again the aid and comfort to the idiot Puritan: don't know why it should help to avoid the phrasing of a direct lie--superstition--somehow it does though and he knows it--my love is wiser than other men_--"Yes, it could have been like that, Mr. Warner." A half-seen glimpse of something kind in black-haired Dolores Acevedo might mean feminine sympathy, fellow-feeling--or something else, or nothing at all. The experts say, Callista remembered, that a person with an obsessive notion never actually performs the fantastic act he imagines performing--like for instance leaning forward in this chair and saying: "Dolly, I bet you know how it feels to go nuts for a good lay."

"After going into the bedroom, what is the next thing that you remember positively?"

"The next thing--the next thing I am really certain about is hearing Ann walk across the living-room--her high heels--to the front door. I heard the door close, heard her car start up and drive away. It somehow--released me--I can't think of a better word. I unlocked the bedroom, came out, got myself a drink of water. I went into the kitchenette to get that instead of to the bathroom. Then--not right away but very soon--I saw the brandy bottle had been pulled forward on the shelf, and there was a glass with a few drops in the bottom, and I knew what must have happened. It brought me out of my fog anyway. I knew I had to get to her at once if I could, and I wasn't able to think beyond that. What I ought to have done--I know it now--was call the police and tell them the emergency. They might have got to her in time and done something for her. But I was shocked silly, I couldn't think of anything except going after her myself, and that's what I did--tried to do."

"Well, you didn't lose any time, I'm sure."

"No, just grabbed my handbag off the living-room table and ran down to the garage. It's back of the apartment--overhead door always sticks, I remember I had to struggle with it as usual but it didn't hold me up long." _Nice old Em Lake, you had such a time yearning after my friend's mammaries--how will these do? Not big, but I bet anything you've seen worse. Drool, old boy, drool all you like if it makes a difference. Will I twitch my jacket back a little? Better, huh? Besides, away up there, sixty-five or whatever it is, doesn't it seem too bad to die at nineteen?_

"Can you judge about what time elapsed, from hearing Ann's car start to getting your own out on the road?"

"It could have been as much as ten minutes. Until I saw that brandy bottle I was just dazed and stupid, not hurrying about anything. I don't know how long I was, coming out of the bedroom, getting that drink of water. I didn't look at the clock or anything, no reason to."

"To be sure. Well--you drove on out to Shanesville?"

"Yes, fast as I could. Wasn't delayed on the road. I pulled into the Dohertys' driveway, alongside the Pontiac--it was just as Sergeant Shields described it. The house was dark. My headlights picked up her handbag lying in the path, so I knew at once she must have gone that way."

"Did you take the flashlight from your car?"

"No, didn't think of it till I'd started down the path. The moon was hazed over, but still pretty strong light." _The Monkshood Girl will now look at the Foreman of the Jury._ "I supposed she must have gone to my mother's house, but when I came to that spur path I--thought--" Peter Anson would not look at her; she was certain he had been doing so, and intently, the instant before her own eyes shifted.

"Take your time, Callista--by the way, would you like a sip of water?"

"Yes, please. Thank you." _Thank you for more than that._ The water was cool and perfect; she held and turned the crystal of the glass until it gave her the excellent diminished star of the ceiling chandelier. Had it been burning all day? She couldn't remember. Probably; a gray series of hours, this Thursday, with a whimpering of December wind. _I'm sorry, Cecil, I know I'm stumbling, not doing very well--keep thinking about twenty-to-life--it wouldn't let me come to you._ "When I came to the spur path it was--oh, just a sort of sick feeling that I ought to look at the pond and make sure she hadn't--it was only a few steps, the light fairly good through the trees. I saw something in the water. It was white, some part of her white blouse."

"You went down that steep path to your left, Callista? Stood on the path first and then over on the left side of the pond?"

"Yes. I could see--enough to know. Then the pains began. I knew she was dead, and I knew what was happening to me. I guess I said, didn't I, that I'd wanted the baby, I wanted to bear it? Did I say that?"

"Yes, my dear, you told Mr. Lamson that--I believe it's not been mentioned here until now. You really did want it, didn't you?"

"Yes."

"You needn't say any more about that now unless you wish."

"All right. I ... well, I don't quite remember getting back to my car. I did it though, and when I reached the junction I remembered that thick second-growth woods across the road from my mother's house. So I parked by the pines, got over there--" _Don't do it, Mrs. Kleinman: Mr. Fielding wouldn't like it, anyway crying is just the glands going into an uproar. I'm not crying--see? Of course, if it means you don't want to burn me_--

"About that also, Callista, you needn't say any more than you want to. The fact of the miscarriage is enough, and I haven't heard the prosecution contesting it. Did you happen to have your wrist watch on, by the way?"

"No, the sticky hot weather, it was chafing my wrist--I'd taken it off at my apartment. Well, when it was over I got back to my car, made the turn in my mother's driveway--" _Sorry, Herb, manner of speaking: she's a very important lady, you know how 'tis_--"and I guess that was the way Miss Welsh described it."

"Do you recall seeing Dr. Chalmers on the porch, turning on the light?"

"I think so. I was clumsy with the gears, backing and turning. Then I held up all right till I got home."

"And then?"

"I found I'd left the apartment door open. I remember closing it and leaning back against it. Then I was on my knees--I don't mean I fainted, I don't think I did. I think--does this sound possible?--I think I just fell asleep. Remember being on my knees, dropping forward on my hands, thinking how soft the rug would be if I could hitch over to it, and I must have done so, because when I came out of--it seemed like a sleep--I was there on the rug with my handbag for a pillow. After I got up I couldn't stop shaking for a long while. I wanted a shower, but couldn't make my fingers take hold of my clothes. The shoes were the worst. Did finally, had the shower too I think, and dozed off again. I didn't see the sun come up--it was in my eyes when I woke. By ten o'clock I'd pulled myself together somehow, got dressed. I called Edith. I knew I'd have to call the police."

"You hadn't done anything with the brandy bottle after you first saw it had been moved?"

"No, I hadn't, and I did nothing with it that morning--just left everything as it was. I supposed that was the right thing to do. But I didn't get up my courage to call the police until after my stepfather had telephoned me, and told me about finding Ann's body. I think it was about eleven o'clock that he called."

"And when you did call the police, what you got was Sergeant Rankin."

"Yes." _When we get this one over with we're done, aren't we, Cecil? Except for--except for_--"He turned up about twelve o'clock."

"You recall his testimony on the stand?"

"Yes. It was accurate except for what it left out, and his denials to you in cross-examination."

"Before we go into that, do you want to tell your side of that thing about the aquarium, Callista?"

"I might as well. It was a foolish impulse. I loved the things, and I had a picture of them going hungry and dying off with the apartment closed. If I'd stopped to think, I'd have known of course that Edith would take care of them for me." _I can't look across the room at you right now, Edith; I don't dare._ "After all she gave them to me herself. It was an impulse of--despair, I think. You see, until Sergeant Rankin made it plain to me, I actually hadn't understood how things were going to look for me. I wasn't thinking clearly at all until then. What he said--and did--showed me how it would be, that I'd be accused of murder and there'd be nothing to disprove it except my word--no tangible evidence in my favor, no one else with any first-hand knowledge of what happened. Naturally as a police officer, Rankin saw that aspect of it right away. Well, the aquarium--I wanted the little tropicals to die quick and easy, that was all."

"I see. You said Rankin's testimony was accurate except for what it left out, and those denials. Will you fill in that blank? Just tell what Rankin did, to the best of your recollection."

"When we were going back to the living-room after I had shown him the brandy bottle, he grabbed hold of me from behind. I was still feeling sick and confused, and startled by what he'd said a minute before--something to the effect that no one would believe my story. I wasn't expecting any physical approach like that. I guess I was aware that he'd started to get excited, but I supposed that being a policeman, he'd at least control himself. I said: 'Take your hands off me!'--something like that--or stronger, I guess--'Take your ugly hands off me, you fool!' He didn't let go. He said he could 'give me a lot of breaks,' as he put it, if I would--'put out.' I tried to break free of him, but couldn't. A sort of stupid wrestling match across the living-room. I couldn't get my wrist free. He forced me down on the couch. I tried to tell him then that I was ill, but it's possible he really didn't hear that. He was in a state of violent excitement--had opened his trousers and was trying to swing my legs up on the couch without letting go my wrist. I told him the Police Department would smash him for it and he'd wind up in jail no matter what happened to me. He managed to say: 'The hell with that--who's going to take your word against mine?' I said that anyhow I could testify he was circumcised, and since he wasn't Jewish that ought to give my word a little weight. It got through to him, and scared him. He gave me an open-handed slap across the face--just a nervous explosion, I guess, hardly knew what he was doing--and let go my wrist, stepped away from me across the room, got himself under control. When he turned back to me he was well behaved. He apologized, said there was something about me that made him lose his head. I think he spoke of having a wife and children, and then something more about it's being my word against his. I don't believe I was able to say anything except that I'd make him no promises about telling or not telling of it. He made his call to headquarters, and the aquarium thing was after that, I guess--yes, it was. What he testified about just sitting there till the others came--that was true. I don't think he looked at me once after that remark I made--something about a spring morning warmed up in the oven."

"Yes, that seems to have made an impression on him." _And yet after all, Cecil, wouldn't we have done better to show Rankin as just one more creature caught in a drift of confusion, half ape, half civilized, like the rest of us?--or maybe we did succeed in doing that--I wouldn't know. LaSalle and Miss Wainwright look quite angry on my behalf. The Face of the Hoag expresses a certain disappointment: 'Wha'd he give up so easy for, and him a cop?' The Face of Fielding says quite truthfully that it hasn't a damn thing to do with the death of Ann Doherty._ "Well, Callista, I suppose Gage and the others arrived quite soon, as he testified. Do you want to add anything about that?"

"No, I don't think of anything important. It was all about as Rankin told it, and then I was taken to Mr. Lamson's office."

"And questioned there--do you happen to remember how long?"

"I think, from about two o'clock until seven in the evening, when I signed that transcript."

"Callista, I will ask you: was there ever any genuine hostility between you and Ann Doherty?"

"When two women want the same man, there's bound to be, Mr. Warner. As a person--if it were possible for me to think of her apart from Jimmy--I had nothing against her. It's true to say I hardly knew her. We had nothing in common. She was a sweet, harmless girl who never did the slightest thing to rouse any hostility in me."

"And I'll ask you, Callista: did you ever, at any time at all, entertain any sort of intention of doing away with her, or in fact of doing her any kind of harm?"

"No. No, Mr. Warner. The worst I ever wished against her was that she would--let Jimmy go."

"Callista, after signing that transcript in Mr. Lamson's office, did you receive medical attention?"

"Oh--yes, I did. I sort of blacked out, after signing it. Came to in some kind of infirmary room--in this building, I guess it is. The police doctor was--all right."

"Do you recall seeing me that evening?"

"Yes, you were there at the infirmary, soon after I came to myself."

"You remember my explanation of why I couldn't be there sooner?"

"Yes, you told me you'd been out of town, and Edith couldn't get word to you until after six o'clock."

"Did you see your mother or your stepfather that day?"

"No. They came, I understand, but weren't allowed to see me."

"So it adds up this way--correct me if I'm wrong: you had a miscarriage about nine o'clock Sunday evening, were in a state of partial or total collapse the greater part of the night. Then official questioning, briefly interrupted by attempted rape, from noon Monday until seven in the evening. Then medical attention. Do you think of anything you want to add at this time, Callista?"

"No, I--" _There must be something. I am not ready_--"No, I don't think so, Mr. Warner."

"You may cross-examine, Mr. District Attorney."

_The Hunter is coming forward_--

8

Whosoever now, Ananda, or after my departure, shall be to himself his own light, his own refuge, and seek no other refuge, will henceforth be my true disciple and walk in the right path.

Reputed saying of GAUTAMA BUDDHA

I

"The chips are down now, aren't they, Callista?"

_She'll understand that the best answer for that one is no answer. But I might_--Cecil Warner remained on his feet by the defense table until he could reassure himself that Callista did understand. She was watching the prosecutor with outward calm, her hands folded--white hands, actually strong, now seeming small and frail.

"Mr. District Attorney, I have one or two old-fashioned quirks. It was natural for Mr. Warner to use my first name because he is a friend as well as my attorney. From you I would prefer a reasonable formality, do you mind?"

_Yes--good--perhaps. Too highbrow for the jury, but it may upset his pace a little._ Warner sat down, forcing upon himself once more the resolution that he would not intervene except as strategy required it. She was, within obvious limits, on her own, and must fight in her own way. He must protect her to the full extent of his position and powers, but the jury must not feel that she was being overprotected. His own words must have the force of economy, and not be wasted merely to relieve his own anguish.

T. J. Hunter was brooding over it. The hour was 4:15, the sky beyond the high windows altogether dark. The day would end with whatever Callista was able to say now, and perhaps in some short redirect examination after Hunter had finished. Closing arguments tomorrow, and probably Terence's summing up: T.J. was not likely to call rebuttal witnesses, and his method did not call for long-winded oratory at the end. The case was likely to go to the jury tomorrow afternoon or evening. _I am not ready._

"Very well, Miss Blake. I'm a plain man myself with only a commonplace education, and I'm afraid I'm a little bit given to plain speech. Did you kill Ann Doherty?"

"No."

"Why--she died of aconite poisoning, didn't she? And drowning? We've all heard that testimony."

"Yes."

"Are you saying someone else gave her the poison?"

"She found the poisoned brandy in my apartment without my knowledge, she drank it without my knowledge. When she drowned in that pond, I was not there. I found her too late."

"That is still your story, Miss Blake?"

"Objection!"

"Sustained." Except for silence, his graceful body stooped slightly forward as though setting itself for a predatory leap, Hunter gave no sign of noticing the interruption. "Do you wish to take an exception, Mr. Hunter?"

"No, your Honor. Miss Blake, in your direct testimony I recall that you chose to qualify one of the remarks made by your friend Edith Nolan, a remark concerning your artistic ability. I believe you said she overrated you. Does that mean that in your estimation, your own estimation, you are really not much of an artist?"

"No, that isn't what I said."

"Then you do consider yourself an artist?"

"Yes, but with less ability than Miss Nolan gives me credit for."

"I see. In how many lines, Miss Blake?"

"Drawing and painting. Nothing else worth mentioning."

"Not in fiction?"

"Objection! The question is wholly improper."

"Sustained."

"Exception. I was using the word in the purely literary sense--literature, fiction-writing, is surely one of the arts."

"Mr. Hunter, since the question of Miss Blake's literary ability has never been introduced at any time in this trial until you mentioned it just now, the Court does not find your explanation altogether acceptable. You may have your exception of course. As you continue, you will avoid sarcasm and innuendo. Miss Blake is entitled to the same respect as any other witness."

"I regret it very much, your Honor, if anything I said had the sound of sarcasm. It was not so intended. Miss Blake, as an artist, in your own estimation, do you share the attitude which I understand is fairly common in some quarters, that an artist is--well, a sort of privileged character? Not to be judged by the standards we apply to ordinary mortals?"

"I do not, and I never knew any artist who held that attitude."

"Have you met a great many of them?"

"No. A few."

"But never met one who felt that he was, let's say, a special sort of being? Someone apart?"

"Special perhaps, or apart, but not specially privileged."

"Not even the beatniks?"

"I don't know anything about the beatniks."

A swift small worm of pain ran down Cecil Warner's left arm, puzzling him. He said with care for the sound of his voice: "Is all this leading anywhere? Does it have any possible relevancy?"

"If the Court please," said T. J. Hunter melodiously, "there has been a great deal said about Miss Blake's state of mind at various times. I have not objected to it. This is in many ways an uncommon case. I am inclined to agree with a remark made by my very honored adversary a little while ago in his opening, when he pointed out how much depends on whether we can or cannot believe Miss Blake's word. He is naturally convinced that she is telling the truth. I am not. She is now on the stand, having affirmed that she will speak truthfully. It is my necessary task to test her credibility in any proper manner that is open to me, and my present line of inquiry is directed to that end."

"The point is well taken," said Judge Mann. Warner heard or imagined a note of weariness or doubt. "Are you making a formal objection, Mr. Warner?"

"No, your Honor. I only wish the prosecutor would get to the point, if there is one."

_A mistake; he'll catch me up on it too._ "There is one," said Hunter mildly. "Perhaps I can make it clearer to counsel later on. Miss Blake, you must have believed--did you not?--that something--maybe not your position as an artist if you say it wasn't that--but something excused you, made it appear all right to you to enter blithely on an adulterous relation with James Doherty."

"I did not enter on it blithely, nor make excuses for myself. I was aware that such a relation is contrary to the principles we give lip-service to in this part of the world."

_She can't--she mustn't_--

"And also contrary to law?"

"Mr. Hunter, I'm afraid I never stopped to find out whether this is one of the states where adultery is listed as a crime."

With deepening terror Warner understood that she was already becoming raw and recklessly angry, though Hunter had scarcely begun. _I must be heard._

"I take that to mean that you hold yourself above the law?"

"I object, your Honor. I submit that in his opening Mr. Hunter laid considerable polite stress on the fact that the indictment charges murder and nothing else. If now he has elected himself some kind of guardian of public morals, if Callista Blake is to be tried after all for a violation of sex conventions--"

"Sir, that's uncalled-for and unjust. My question was phrased in general terms. I think nothing could bear more directly on the credibility of the witness than her respect for law, or lack of it."

"You were asking," said Judge Mann, "in general terms, whether or not the witness considers herself above the law? That was the meaning of your question and the extent of it?"

"It was, your Honor."

"I must overrule your objection, Mr. Warner."

"Exception."

"Yes, certainly. Answer the question, Miss Blake."

"I do not consider myself above the law." _At least she's quieter; her hands not shaking._ "Like everyone, I've probably broken a number of minor laws without even knowing it. As for the matter the prosecutor specifically mentioned, adultery, I don't know, as I said, how the state of New Essex technically regards that action. If it's a crime, then I'm a criminal--on that charge." _No more, Callista! LOOK AT ME!_ "I'm quite aware you can't have a human society without laws. I try to respect them so far as I'm able--I--"

"Miss Blake," said Judge Mann, "there is no need to go beyond the question. For your own sake I must instruct you not to do so. Limit your answers to what Mr. Hunter asks, so far as you can."

_He may have saved her--I don't know--I don't know._

"You respect the laws so far as you are able--now what does that mean, Miss Blake? At what point, please, does it become impossible for you to respect the laws?"

"No one could answer that exactly. As a lawyer, you certainly know that many laws are obsolete or foolish. Dead-letter laws--Sunday blue laws--that sort of thing. I would never willingly break any law that the majority considers important."

"I see. You have decided then that the majority doesn't consider the law against adultery important?"

"I don't know--I've already said I don't even know what laws New Essex has about that. If people are ever prosecuted for it--I suppose they are--I never heard of it."

"Your answer isn't quite responsive. Do you mean you believe that in breaking the seventh commandment you were merely doing what everyone does more or less?"

"I didn't say that. I--"

Warner let his voice go: "I will inquire again whether the District Attorney believes he is trying a case of adultery."

"I will reply again that I wish to discover Miss Blake's attitude toward law itself, as it bears on the reliability of her statements."

Judge Mann spoke with acid: "Gentlemen ... Mr. Hunter, your point may be still defensible, but I think you're going too far afield. I suggest you bring your inquiry back to factual evidence and the material of direct testimony."

"Very well, your Honor. Miss Blake, do you have a clear recollection of those letters of yours which were read in court this morning?"

"Very clear."

Warner saw him take them up from among the exhibits; fought back his surge of resentment that those hands, clean, excellently shaped, well manicured, should be handling them at all. "I recall, Miss Blake, that before these letters were read, quite a point was made about seeing to it that the jury heard a correct interpretation. This seems like a good opportunity to clear up one or two points and give the jury your own views on what they mean--that is, I take it you have no objection?"

"You needn't make such a production of stage politeness." _Callista, don't!_ "I'm prepared to answer any legitimate questions as well as I can."

Hunter's eyebrows rose and fell. He read to himself, slipped the first page under and read on. "Well--'my love (you know it) is nothing like what could happen for you with anyone but me. And there's my cure for jealousy--if I could apply it, if I could make my head rule a little more, my crazy heart a little less.' That appears, Miss Blake, to be among other things an admission that you did experience what's usually called jealousy. 'Something that could not happen with Ann. Or anywhere in her world.' That's jealousy, isn't it?"

"I did experience it. I haven't denied it."

"No? Now I thought that in direct testimony you said something to the effect that you had nothing against her. I think that--in direct testimony under oath--you called her a 'sweet and harmless girl'--something like that."

"I think I said--apart from Jimmy--meaning--apart from the fact that she was his wife--oh, it's perfectly clear what I meant."

"That is, you had nothing against her except that she was in the way?"

"I never said that--never put it that way, even to myself."

"I'm sorry, Miss Blake, I think you did." He turned pages slowly. "Not in those exact words perhaps. 'Granted also that Ann is good and sweet and conventionally right. Does that give her the right--' and then the crossed-out words that I think you remember, and then--'to keep you and me apart and prevent my child from having a father?' Miss Blake, how much nearer could you come to saying that she was in the way without actually using the words?"

"The marriage--the fact of their marriage was in the way. I never thought of her as a--a person to be removed--oh, I'm not saying it clearly--I never wanted to--do away with her. My letter says--my letter simply asks him to do something about a separation. And that's the