letter I never even mailed.

"All right--it sounds a little involved--the letter doesn't sound to me as if you were writing about the 'fact of their marriage,' but let that go for the present. This is from the first one, a letter you did mail: '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.' This time I am frankly puzzled, Miss Blake. It is by chance a quotation from something?"

"No."

"You had been writing affectionately--and poetically, I must say--and then all of a sudden you throw this at him: 'No one can own me--born a heretic and so live.' I'm simply puzzled, Miss Blake. Why in the world were you moved to say to James Doherty: 'No one can catch me except if I will'--why?"

Warner saw the violent tension and forced relaxation of her folded hands. She said: "It must be--it must be it never occurred to me the letter would be examined by a district attorney."

"What?--you mean it's a form of doubletalk? Hidden significance, something that might be damaging if it came to the eyes of that lowest form of life, a district attorney?"

"No--no--no hidden significance." She was turning her head from side to side as if in search of physical escape. "I don't know how you dissect a love-letter. Do it yourself--do it yourself--"

"'No one can catch me except if I will.' And then you were caught, weren't you?"

"Objection!"

"Sustained--sustained. You know better than that, Mr. Hunter. And step back from the stand a little. I will not have the witness abused."

"My regrets, your Honor. I had no such intention." _Throws it like a bone to a dog--Terry's no dog--but_--"Miss Blake, I will read to you from the second letter. You had been asking about Doherty's religious views, and then you wrote: '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.' Miss Blake, by what reasoning it is possible to reconcile that remark with your alleged intention of asking Mrs. Doherty to agree to a separation? How could you write that about her, and then in the very same letter talk about her meekly agreeing to a separation?"

"I suppose--I suppose the remark about her condemning us--I suppose I wrote that in a moment of exasperation, and was calmer later on. I don't know--must a love-letter be consistent like a dictionary?"

"All right, I see what you mean, but on that point the inconsistency is really glaring, isn't it? You knew--elsewhere in the letters you even grudgingly admit--that Mrs. Doherty loved her husband. You knew, and you specifically said, that she would regard your adulterous relation with him as sinful--of course, how could you doubt it, what wife in her right mind wouldn't regard it so? Yet in almost the same breath you're talking about a separation, as if you expected Ann Doherty to throw away her marriage, violate her deepest religious convictions, humbly agree to letting her husband go live in sin with his ... with you. Consistent?"

"I suppose it's inconsistent, if you make no allowance for the other things I said."

"Oh--there is something else in the letter that makes it consistent?"

"I don't know--I don't know."

"Miss Blake, on the basis of these letters, and your testimony, I will ask you: weren't you, in all this talk of a separation, simply proposing an impossibility, knowing it was one, to--well, what? See what Jimmy would do? To feel him out maybe, find out if he'd go along with you on some much more direct method of--eliminating the woman who was in the way?"

"That's idiotic."

"Well, if I'm an idiot you should have no trouble defending yourself."

"Witness and counsel will both confine themselves to the issues. No more of that sort of thing."

"My apologies, your Honor. All right, Miss Blake, we'll let that stand. But in my--simple way, I keep trying to understand. Now for example in the rest of this second letter, where you attack Doherty's religious faith--"

"I never attacked it! In that letter I was _asking_ about his beliefs, and stating some of my own ideas, nothing more."

"Oh? I must have misunderstood. Let's see--you wrote here, speaking of his religion: '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.' That's not an attack?"

"No, it is not."

"I see--the fault's with my understanding. And further on you wrote: '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?' But you're telling me seriously now that this isn't to be called an attack on the man's most vital and deeply cherished religious convictions?"

Callista said: "Mr. Hunter, I think your A is a little bit flat."

One giggle sounded, in the back row, probably the same adenoidal snigger that had punctuated the trial from the start. There was no other laughter. Only a hush. The same kind of hush, Warner thought, that might have held the crowd in shock and incredulity, hundreds of years ago, if some candidate for an Inquisition bonfire had ventured to poke a little fun at the officiating priest. And T.J. was in fact performing certain priestly functions. _So what am I then? Advocatus diaboli?_ He saw Terence Mann's hand clench spasmodically and fall in a droop.

Hunter said somberly, when the moment was right: "I have no objection to your odd sense of humor, Miss Blake, if you are enjoying it. But I would like a responsive answer."

"Mr. Hunter, I did not think of James Doherty as a child. At any rate I tried not to. Apparently I rated his intelligence more highly than you do. I did not think that his religious beliefs had to be coddled and protected, or avoided the way you might avoid too much comment on a child's make-believe. Therefore in that letter to him I asked him about his beliefs, as one might ask any adult, and I wrote a little about my own ideas. It can't be called an attack unless you feel that the mere mention of an unreligious idea is an attack on religion. I'm aware that a lot of people do feel that way. They take all dissent as if it were an unkind criticism of themselves. Maybe Doherty did too, but I didn't think so at the time."

Could she have won that round, or partly won it? It seemed to Cecil Warner that her voice had recovered some steadiness and coolness. Fielding looked somewhat impressed, as well as Helen Butler, LaSalle, and maybe Miss Wainwright. But the others were annoyed, or puzzled, or not listening. And about Fielding it was never possible to be sure.

"He's 'Doherty' to you now? Not 'Jimmy' any more, just 'Doherty'?"

She turned her face to the Judge with a look of blindness. "Must I answer that?"

"You need not," said Judge Mann. "I think you might withdraw the question, Mr. Hunter."

But even at that moment--the Judge manifestly friendly, Hunter showing up badly as his antagonism became too obviously personal and overdramatized--even at that more or less favorable moment Warner felt a change in Callista, a retreat or a weakening, as though before his eyes she had slipped further away from him, almost out of sight and hearing. He might, he supposed, be exaggerating her look of increased exhaustion, a fault in his own powers of observation. The pain slid down his arm again, compelling some part of his mind to mumble: _Heart?--and irrelevant?_ Callista was not necessarily in flight, not necessarily losing her desire to live. A better part of his mind recalled a better voice, speaking with a nearly incomprehensible sweetness: "_Living is journeying, and love's a region we can enter for a while._"

"I withdraw my question. Miss Blake, as the author of these letters, I take it you are the one person best qualified to explain this sentence: 'You are already a prisoner, and I wish I might set you free.'"

"Oh--oh--explain it by what follows, can't you? I think when I wrote that I wasn't referring to Ann."

"Well, not exactly, Miss Blake. The words I see on this page are: 'No, I don't hate Ann, I was not thinking only of Ann when I wrote that.' _Only_, Miss Blake--that seems to say pretty plainly that you're at least including Ann Doherty in what you wrote about your Jimmy being a prisoner. Doesn't it?"

"All right--if you wish."

"It's no question of what I wish, Miss Blake."

"I think it is--I think you--no, never mind, I don't mean that. Go ahead and ask your question--what do you want to know?"

"I am asking for your interpretation of that sentence: 'You are already a prisoner, and I wish I might set you free'--insofar as it does refer to Ann Doherty."

Her voice had gone dull and flat, hard to hear from Warner's place: "No interpretation except the obvious one. His marriage trapped him, confined him." Warner's ears had begun a faint ringing; he undid the top button of his shirt--a little better. "I suppose marriage does that for anyone, man or woman, and usually the restrictions are voluntarily accepted, welcomed, or so people like to think. I suppose that's all I meant."

"But the rest of the sentence, Miss Blake--'I wish I might set you free'--what did you mean by that?"

"Why, the--the separation--what I've said repeatedly--I think I wrote about that in the very next paragraph, didn't I?"

"Yes, you did," said Hunter in a dull and abstracted voice that curiously echoed her own. "So you did. 'You are already a prisoner, and I wish I might set you free.'" He came out of his abstraction briskly. "Well--no more about that? Nothing you wish to add?"

"Nothing."

"I see. 'Are we savages to be held in line by magic words mumbled in the mouth of a priest?'--do you want to comment on that sentence from your letter, Miss Blake? Explain, perhaps, why it's not to be taken as an attack on James Doherty's religion?"

"Genuine faith can't be attacked, Mr. Hunter, because it hasn't anything to do with reason. Religious people sometimes admit that themselves, if they've done any thinking about it. I remember hoping rather foolishly that he would be able to see my side of the question. As for what I wrote there, it's a--a comment on superstition. If you heard it in ordinary conversation it wouldn't trouble you much. It's important now only because you've decided to try me for irreligion as well as murder."

"No, Miss Blake, I am still concerned with your attitude toward law, as it bears on your credibility and on the issues of this trial. Now I hear that the marriage sacrament to you is a superstition proper to savages--that's what you meant, isn't it?"

"Marriage is a legal status. A marriage certificate is a legal document. When you talk about the sacrament of marriage you're expressing a religious view that has no legal meaning."

"Oh, well--"

"Ask any lawyer."

"Why, as an amateur lawyer, Miss Blake, you happen to be perfectly right. But that isn't quite the point, is it? It seems to me that in tossing off a comment like that to James Doherty on the subject of his marriage to Ann Doherty you were placing yourself pretty far above the law as well as above religion. Heard now, under these circumstances, doesn't it sound pretty arrogant even to you?"

"Not nearly as arrogant as the first premises of a true believer or a prosecuting attorney--"

The break in her voice had been unmistakable. Warner knew that if he stood up then and spoke, he would only be compounding disaster by drawing more attention to it. _When did I lose her? When did she go away? A little while ago she still desired to live._ He tried to recast the outline of his closing speech--more emphasis here, less there. And perhaps in redirect some of the damage could be repaired. _The defense never rests._

"I suppose I must leave it at that," Hunter said. "But maybe I ought to remind you, Miss Blake, that I could have no interest in making any personal attack against you, as you seem to feel I'm doing. I am simply a servant of the State, with a duty to perform."

"No," she said emptily, "that's not quite true. Impartiality isn't any part of the system. You hate and fear me because--"

"Miss Blake," said Judge Mann sharply, "for your own sake there must be no such expressions of personal feeling. It's perfectly true that impartiality is hard to achieve, because we're all human. But in a law court we do try to achieve it. This procedure, this sometimes clumsy mechanism of a trial--it's an attempt at fairness, objectivity, the best we can do under the present conditions of society. Now I must warn you, and very urgently: simply answer the prosecutor's questions as plainly as you can, unless the Court rules you need not answer, and don't try to go beyond those questions. That rule--in fact the whole procedure--is for your own protection."

Directly to the Judge, and quietly, but also as though she had not really taken in his words at all, Callista said: "I never wanted her to die."

Warner saw Judge Mann turn to him, distress momentarily plain to read, as though the Judge and not the defense were most in need of help. "Mr. Warner, if you wish a recess--"

"No!" said Callista, and that was a cry. "I want this to be finished. I'm perfectly able to answer the questions, but I can't go away and come back to it, I can't do that. No recess now, please!"

"Your Honor, I think--so long as my client feels able to continue and wishes to--but--reserving the privilege of asking for a recess later if--"

"Yes, certainly, Mr. Warner. Whenever you want to request it."

Hunter said, gently and mildly, no longer half-crouched like a man readying himself to rape, but standing some distance from the witness stand, almost careless in his quiet--"You never wanted her to die, Callista?"

"No, I--yes, when--nobody ever answered Pilate."

"Yes some of the time, no some of the time--that would be natural, perfectly human, wouldn't it, Callista?"

"I suppose...."

"Does it mean, Callista, that you've remembered what happened in that lapse of memory--the thing you couldn't tell Mr. Lamson?"

"Yes."

Warner understood he had risen. But there were no words. She must know that he would come to her if he could; but she would not look at him now--only at Hunter, and without hostility, but with somber recognition, as if suddenly after much bewilderment she understood why he was there and what purposes he might serve.

"What happened, Callista?"

"I heard her take the bottle from the shelf, and the sound of a glass. I heard her come to my door, and knock, and say that she'd poured a drink for me. I lay still. I deceived myself a little, I think--I tried to imagine it was not the poison, then I tried to tell myself she would not drink it. But for a few seconds or minutes the strongest part of me was the part that held me there, willing that she should drink it. When she was gone, and I knew what had happened, that self, that part of me, was no longer in command. Then I became--whatever else I am, and have been since then. Now I'll answer no more questions, even from those I love."

II

The courtroom had gone into a silence where voices were remembered with uncertainty, like the dead. The judge's chair was empty. Three reporters talked in small murmurs at the press table, waiting it out, and a few spectators remained. Edith watched Mr. Delehanty appear from the small side door at her left, take up with quiet importance a manila folder from his idle desk, mutter inaudibly to one of the bailiffs, glance first at an old-fashioned gold watch from his pocket and then toward the door on the right through which the jury had disappeared three hours ago; then he tiptoed in dignity away. It was nine o'clock in the evening of Friday, December 11th. Closing speeches, the judge's summing up and charge to the jury--done, and anticlimactic all of them, for it seemed to Edith that it was Callista herself who had closed the trial, yesterday. "_I'll answer no more questions_--" standing up then, even before she was dismissed, but waiting with the politeness of a tired guest until Hunter murmured something that Edith did not hear; and she stepped down, took hold of Cecil Warner's hand, and walked with him drowsily to the defense table, and sat leaning her head back against his arm, eyes closed, until the Judge announced adjournment for the day. No part of the courtroom ritual now remained--except one. The long finger of the electric wall clock jerked, and was still a while.

After today's ordeal of listening--anticlimactic, yes, the Judge's voice roughened at the end of his summing-up, at moments not plainly audible, running down like a mechanism with a used-up spring--after the jury had retired, Edith had seen Victoria Chalmers press her hand to her broad pale forehead, rise, accept with sad patience the Associate Professor's fumbling courtesy with her coat, and move away. She would be having one of her headaches. No nod for Edith--Herb Chalmers gave her one--and no backward look at the arena; but as Victoria turned her head the light washed coldly across her face, and Edith saw plainly that even Victoria was a little changed. A sag of the mouth, a droop of shoulders and sturdy frame, a slowness and uncertainty in the hands adjusting her coat that suggested old age, although she was still in the early forties. She seemed doubtful of her steps, an unsteady hand undecided whether to grasp her handbag or tuck it under her arm. At the exit she did look backward once, with vagueness, as though there might be something she wished to say; or even someone she wished to find. Then like an old lady she rested her arm on Herb's clumsy hand, and was gone.

Edith found it was now natural, inevitable, to pity Victoria Chalmers--whatever pity might be worth. Earlier, until the jury went out through that doorway, there had somehow not been time. There was time now for every sort of thought, regret and fear and wonder, time for a swarm of thoughts crowding for attention, pity the least of them--time for anything the mind could do except for the discoveries of happiness and peace. Pity, maybe, was no more than a private vice, with varied by-products, some good, some bad.

Herb Chalmers had come back an hour later, alone. He made as though to sit down by himself, but seeing her look his way, he shambled to her, side-stepping along a row of vacant seats, and let himself down by her in a long-legged sprawl. "I suppose nothing's happened yet?"

"Nothing. Is Mrs. Chalmers all right?"

"I don't know," he said, his weariness lending the force of truth to the absent reply. He yawned convulsively, apologizing for it in a mumble. "She's pretty used up of course. Felt she couldn't stay, and I thought that was sensible. I took her home, and maybe she can sleep. It's not as if we could do anything now. For a while. You see, I feel sure that they--" he rubbed large hands over his face and shook his head--"no, God knows I don't feel sure of anything any more. Anything at all."

Herb also had aged. More deeply sunken lines, more gray in the thinning hair. He had evidently cut himself shaving that morning; the scab at the edge of his gaunt jawbone was overlaid by the day's growth of silvery bristle, making a sort of Skid Row shadow across his wan, weak, intelligent face.

"They can't find first degree," Edith said. "It's not possible." Yet she might be only trying to convince herself; she heard no strength in her own voice. "The Judge's summing-up--oh, he had to define all the possible verdicts, but the way he did it, the stress he laid on reasonable doubt--and then even the very fact that she said what she did, at the end--they can't do that."

He mumbled what might have been agreement, then turned to her suddenly, large-eyed, wounded, ineffectual. "They could though, Miss Nolan. Juries ... we have to face the fact, anything's possible from acquittal to--first degree. Law tries to go by logic, but never quite succeeds." More than one way, she thought inconsequently, of facing facts: walk up to a fact and spit in its eye, Callista's way; or, like Herb Chalmers, just stand there. And you could make out a pretty good case for Herb's way, sometimes. _My way--my way..._ "Why didn't he call me, Miss Nolan?"

"Well, he--I think he felt that character witnesses--and that's all I amounted to--couldn't help much. Any more of that would have pointed up the lack of any other kind of evidence. I suppose juries discount the word of friends and relatives; it's natural."

He wasn't listening much. "I would have done anything. I failed her somehow, somewhere along the line. From the start, I guess." He sighed and fidgeted. "But maybe she'd have resented anyone situated in her father's place. I remember when I first met her, a kid of eleven, I said: 'Look, Callie, I'm not your father and couldn't try to be anything like him. I'm just me, a person, and I'd like us to be friends.' Eleven--it never got across, you know? Infantile glowering, and then a kind of frozen politeness that I never could break through." He sat quiet, perhaps aware of her as a listener, gazing aimlessly at the broad knuckles of his bony hands. He said with curious humility and no resentment: "She's always had a good deal of contempt for me, I think. Children grow up so fast, and we grow old so fast. You know, Miss Nolan, a while ago I started something, a piece of writing--nothing very much, but it might prove interesting. A study of the Cavalier and Courtier Lyrists. I want to relate them to certain trends in modern poetry. You know, it's never been done. Oh, I suppose it'll turn out to be just another trifle of academic stuff. But the curious thing--look, I'm afraid I'm boring you or getting on your nerves at a bad time--"

"No, you're not, not in the least." Her impulse toward callous and hopeless laughter ceased of itself, no need to fight it down. Abruptly, there was nothing funny at all about stringy Herb Chalmers having an affair with the saucy music and tenderness of the Lyrists. He was a scholar; he knew his subject; he might even have something to say.

"Well, the curious thing--" he blushed briefly like a schoolboy, and blew his nose, and sighed--"curious thing, when I was getting together some of my notes for it the other day, I kept thinking--imagining Callista reading it. Escape psychology, I suppose."

"Why call it that? 'Escape' is just another one of those two-for-a-nickel derogatory noises that people use in place of thinking. Why not escape from ugliness toward something better? Escaping doesn't mean you've forgotten the ugliness is there."

"Something in that. Is Warner with her, do you know?"

"I think so. He wouldn't leave her unless she asked to be alone."

"He surprised me this morning, that closing speech. Two and a half hours. I never thought he'd take all morning, and repeat himself so much. It was--effective, maybe, but it scared me too. I couldn't help thinking it was effective only for people who already _know_ Callista. I tried to think myself into the position of a juryman, a mind totally alien to Callista's. Everything he said was good, but he said too much. Trying to ram it through a stone wall.... I suppose you saw how once or twice he lost the thread of what he was saying and just stood there. Looking lost."

"Yes. He's not just a defense lawyer in this thing. He loves her."

"I've felt that, yes. And so did the jury, I'm afraid--more than he should have let them feel it. It even gave Hunter his cue, I think. After all that thunder and pleading, he could afford to be quiet and cold, and make the mere contrast seem like a virtue. Taking it off now and then to abstract principles the way Warner did--that was good, for us. I can't believe more than two or three of the jury went along with it. 'The defense never rests'--yes, but what can that plumber foreman make out of it? Ah, I don't know...." The intelligent professor faded, leaving a collapsed and tired old man. He shrugged, looked at his watch, gathered his legs under him. "I'm going out for a smoke. Want to?"

"No, I'd better stay, Dr. Chalmers. She'll be coming back when the jury returns, if it does return tonight. She's always looked for me when she first comes in. I've got to be here."

"Yes, I--of course." He blundered away a few steps and turned back to her. "Miss Nolan, I thought you were quite wonderful on the stand--said a number of things I would have liked to say."

Edith winced inwardly, wishing he would go. "In the jury's view I wasn't good. Another maverick."

"Oh, I don't know." He rubbed his sagging face. "Shouldn't underestimate their intelligence, I suppose. It's--democracy in action, you might say--something like that."

"Democracy be God-damned," Edith said. "It's a human life."

"Well, I--see what you mean of course." He stood tall and drooping near her, so that she must bend her neck awkwardly to see his face as he went on, driven by some compulsion to talk when perhaps he had no real wish to do so: "Strange thing--had a dream a while ago, possibly an echo of my reading--Huck Finn likely. Lost in a fog, on a raft, watching the river stream past me--sometimes the water'd slop up between chinks in the logs. All under a milky fog, no landmarks, but I could see the river all the time, the dark flow of it, now and then trash and broken things sliding past. It went on, you know, years, a hundred years, who could say? And I thought I was motionless, nothing more than a pair of eyes, brain somewhere back of them. Well, but--here was the nightmare, you see--I suddenly understood that I was drifting too, had been all the time. Doesn't sound like anything in the telling, but it was horrible--I can't tell you. Drifting all the time when I thought only the river was in motion. The sleeping brain's comment on myself, you see?--myself as summing up all human stupidity. Or blindness--much kinder word, isn't it? 'So may you, when the music's done, awake and see the rising sun'--that's from Thomas Carew, I think, died 1639 or around there. My head is an attic, you know, full of little facts with dust on them. They were so concerned, those poets, with treating love itself as a work of art, you'd think to read them superficially they had nothing else on their minds. But there was a depth, Miss Nolan, something you don't discover right away. All that polish, glitter, gracefulness, word-play, that was something they produced _after_ accepting the squalor and danger and confusion of seventeenth-century living. They knew what they were doing. Reading the avant-garde stuff of nowadays, usually the contrast is merely grotesque, still I keep finding parallels. Here and there. It keeps an old man interested. Well, I'm babbling like second childhood. Telling dreams, at my age! Look, can I get you anything? I think I'll take a walk around the block, can't sit still. Coke? Sandwich?"

"I guess not, thanks all the same. Jumpy stomach."

"Mm, I know." Her neck ached. _Please go!_ He was leaning down, a remote, remotely friendly ghost, a friend of Thomas Carew, also a human being in distress. "A thing like this--you know, Miss Nolan, I believe the very worst of it is that we _forget_. Because we have to, maybe. We're beaten down somehow, used up, licked in the end by the daily littleness--head colds, weakening eyesight, the brush-your-teeth-and-put-out-the-milk-bottles sort of thing, and there's no defense." At any other time, Edith thought, she would have enjoyed listening to this particular Herb Chalmers. "My God, littleness steals everything, including the last breath. And before then, you see, no matter what we resolve, what we hope for--we forget."

"I sha'n't forget."

"I'm fifty, Miss Nolan. You're still very young. Thirty years from now, d'you think you'll know just as clearly what's been happening here, what will happen when those people come back through that door? Ah, I don't know, I'm talking like a fool--who's going to see thirty years ahead? Jim Doherty's already forgetting. In a bar."

"What? Did you see him?"

"Last night he was anyway, and it looked as if he was laying the foundation for a long one. After I took Vic home last night I came back to town, to the college--had to make some kind of pass at the week's work that's piled up on me--they've been very nice, leave of absence and so on, but I notice things pile up anyway, letters, term papers, what not. On the way home I stopped at Judson's--that's uptown, bar where I used to go sometimes with Jim and--Ann, before all this. He was there, tight as a tick, must have been working on it all afternoon. Not here today, I notice. Last night I tried to get him to go home with me, but he'd made friends with some character who looked respectable, capable of putting him to bed right side up."

Edith said absently: "Someone will always be around to put him to bed."

"Know what you mean. Democracy in action." _I can't smile, Herb._ "Well--go for a walk, I guess. Can't sit still. 'Bye." He stumbled off, a weary progress with a slow grab at every chair-back along the awkward route...

Cecil Warner came through the doorway at the left, alone, his broad face sallow, all ruddiness washed away. He passed the press table with a shake of the head and no other answer to some tactless and poorly timed question. He came up the aisle, and sank with slow motion into the seat beside Edith, relaxing his bulk all at once with the suddenness of an old man's muscles letting go. "Tell me," she said.

"A message. She wanted me to come to you with a message. 'Tell my friend Edith I'll sleep well tonight, and ask her whether she'd like me to try Doris Wayne in oil or watercolor.'" He would not quite look at her. "She was smiling, Edith. It seemed to be a little flash of happiness, like a breeze on a still day."

"It's good if she can think ahead. I've been trying to, but I can't. Herb Chalmers was here, wandered off--good Lord, half an hour ago! I've just been sitting like a vegetable." She saw his eyes were held by the clock, against his will. "Cecil, does it necessarily mean anything at all, when they stay out this long?"

He looked at her then, studying her face as if from a distance, deeply aware of her and certainly no less aware of the girl in the detention cell. He said: "It's not good."

"It's what would happen if there was a disagreement, isn't it?"

"Yes. A disagreement would not be good. A new trial very likely wouldn't come before Terence Mann. And I wouldn't be competent, physically competent, to go through it again. I'm getting pains down the left arm, other things--" he waved his hand quickly and irritably to dismiss the concern in her face. "Couldn't risk conking out in the middle of a trial. That would make a mistrial, then another wait, a third trial with some other attorney, quite likely some other judge--Hangman Cleever for instance. No good, no good. Oh, I shouldn't have taken it on this time. Or I should have got someone younger to work in court with me. That's only one mistake I made. I've made hundreds. Vanity, vanity, thinking myself better able to defend her than anyone else, and blundering all the time--"

"No."

"Don't waste your breath comforting me now. I can see it, Edith, I can see it. My last mistake was talking too long this morning. I couldn't let go, even when I knew I wasn't getting through to them. Some kind of idiot compulsion to hold off the moment when T.J. would start--as if that could make any difference. A cub fresh out of law school wouldn't make such an error--I've been at it forty years."

"Cecil, stop whipping yourself. You did everything possible."

"Everything I could, yes. But everything I could do wasn't enough, and a lot of it was done wrong. A stronger man could have done more, done it better. Why, there's the big evil of the adversary system, Edith, right under our noses. Should the life or freedom of a human being depend on the perfectly irrelevant strength or weakness of opposing counsel? What in hell do my skill and brains, or T.J.'s, have to do with Callista's innocence or any of the other facts? What could be more medieval? But we accept it, have accepted it for hundreds of years, meekly, stupidly, as if no other method were possible or worth a thought. I've spent my life inside the propositions of a vicious fallacy, and discovered it at sixty-eight."

"One man couldn't do away with the fallacy. It's too heavily established, and maybe there isn't enough wisdom in the world yet to develop a better way. You had to work inside of what you found, and it's not wasted effort. Within the system, you've saved a good many lives from public vengeance--and never mind whether they've been good lives like Callista's, or the lives of crooks and psychopaths, that's not the point. Each time you've set your face against public vengeance, you've brought some minds that much nearer to learning that the whole notion of vengeance and punishment is wrong. You've done your share. You've been on the side of mercy. How many can say that?"

"Well, my dear, you're good for me. Maybe I should have been a doctor. I remember thinking of it for a while, when I was in college--but I felt that the wish wasn't enough, that I didn't have the other qualities it needs."

"I think a defense lawyer--your kind of defense lawyer, Cecil--is in something like a doctor's position, but without any adequate sciences to support him. A doctor can draw on chemistry, physiology, pharmacology, a dozen other disciplines, and rely pretty solidly on what he gets from them. A lawyer trying to be useful according to rational ethics--what is there to help him? An infant science of human behavior, full of errors and contradictions and blank spots, hardly more advanced than physiology was in the eighteenth century; and haunted by the crackpots and manipulators too, so that it's sometimes hell's own job to separate the science from the special pleading. So I think, Cecil, that anyone who defends a life against the crowd's desire for a victim, who shows up the flaws in the system by bucking it--he's pioneering, he's taking a part in bringing law nearer to reality. I'll set Clarence Darrow in the same company with Semmelweiss and Pasteur, any time, no strain. And you."

He covered his face quickly with his hands; said after a while: "I wish I were a younger man, to hear that."

Edith looked away at the clock. Her mind was caught in a brief paralysis of waiting for the next twitch of the minute hand. "I drew something the other night, Cecil, a memory sketch of that jury. It's curiously good." She heard his breathing slow and become quiet. "My own style, but the kind of thing I was never able to do before. I want you to see it. Come over soon anyway--I need my friends too, you know. We try, Cecil, oddballs like you and Callista and me, others here and there. Herb Chalmers told me he's having a thing with the Cavalier and Courtier Lyrists. I started laughing inside--just started because it seemed so damn far away from everything--and then stopped laughing. It's Herb's way of trying, using his brains in his own style on what's nearest to his reach."

"Callista and I put the human race on trial the other night. We came to no conclusion, no verdict."

"Well, I think there's an obvious verdict in that case, and maybe only one possible at the present stage."

"So? You tell me."

"Not proven."

"I should have thought of that. Cal would like it. I'll remember to tell her." Beyond the melancholy and desolation of his face she saw Herb Chalmers returning along the row of empty seats. Warner nodded to him morosely. "Herb. All by yourself?"

"I took Vic home." Herb Chalmers showed the dubious tension of a news-bringer. "Cecil, what way does the jury-room face?"

"What way?" The Old Man's eyebrows bunched aggressively in perplexity. "The Court Street side. Why, Herb?"

"They're yawping a _Courier_ extra on the street. Judd died in the hospital a couple of hours ago." He pulled a smeary paper from his overcoat and handed it to Warner, who stared at the splash of black ink and let the thing slither to the floor. "A brass-lunged newsboy, Cecil: 'Blake Case Witness Dies ree aw abowit!'"

"Some fool," Warner said--"some fool in the jury-room is bound to open a window, to let the smoke out."

"He was shouting pretty plain. I could make out the words a block away. Any legal significance, you think?"

"I doubt it, Herb." Warner looked up hopelessly. "Anyway she gains nothing from a mistrial. Likely it wouldn't even go before the same judge, a second time. Everything that could happen," he said. "Malice, chance, blind circumstance, human frailty. Even the malice nobody's fault really--not even T.J.'s. He's something worked by strings."

"They can't find first degree," Edith said, and hated the querulous shake in her voice, its jaded insistence on what she could not know.

"Twenty to life," said Warner.

"She's young," Edith said. "She's very young."

Herb asked: "Wouldn't actually be twenty, would it? Don't they--"

"She's young," said Warner, his voice all bitterness, "and it wouldn't actually be twenty years."

The door on the right opened for a court officer, who spoke to someone over his shoulder. Warner stood up, breathing carefully. Edith caught his arm; he looked down almost angrily. "Cecil, tell her I'd like her to try it in watercolor."

"Oh. Yes. I'll go with her now." He was hurrying down the aisle.

Herb said: "What--he meant to say he'd go to her, I suppose."

"He knew what he was saying. Sit here. Stay with me, please."

She watched the courtroom coming alive. Knowledge of the jury's returning had spread as if by a spark of telepathy. A group of the last-ditch curious straggled back from the corridors, and newsmen who must have been waiting at some point of vantage outside, and Mr. Delehanty--gravely ready at his desk before the Twelve filed in.

Judge Terence Mann came in and took his place without delay, moving for once not easily but with a suggestion of middle age. He did not reach as usual for his note-pad and pencil; he dropped his thin rugged hands on the desk and stared at the space between them until his eyes must turn, like all the others, to the door on the left.

She was with Cecil Warner. She looked at once for Edith, and seeing her stepfather also she smiled once, quickly and warmly--a new thing to remember. She held closely to Warner's arm until they reached the defense section; then she stood alone, not troubling to seat herself. No doubt someone, the Judge or Mr. Delehanty, should have told her to sit down; but she remained standing until the jury, at Judge Mann's word, self-consciously rose.

Mr. Francis Fielding looked tired and for the first time regretful.

"Members of the jury, have you reached a verdict in the case now before you?"

Peter Anson said: "We have."

Callista looked on the jury as Edith had never seen her look on others before. It was a look of patience resembling friendliness, a look that one might naturally give to strangers who were confronted by a painful difficulty and not quite able to understand its nature.

"What is your verdict?"

"We find the defendant, Callista Blake, guilty of murder in the first degree, without recommendation of mercy."

III

_From a letter written by Terence Mann, formerly Justice of the Court of General Sessions of Winchester County, New Essex, July 17, 1960, to Dr. John Sever Mann, of Boston_:

... For that matter, I can hardly understand that more than a week has passed since Callista died. My sense of time seems to be still slightly distorted. For many days and months, too much to endure and understand, hope for and relinquish; then quiet, aftermath. Finished. The new things that begin, some of them surely good, are not yet clear in my mind, nor in Edith's--we're tired, Jack.

Last night I finished and mailed that letter I told you about, to the president of the New Essex Bar Association, setting out in writing my reasons for resigning from the bench. Mr. Paulus, president of the B.A., is a very pleasant character, a successful gentleman but also mellow and moderately philosophical, capable of filling that position with no sense of strain, and yet able to see quite a distance into a stone wall. In him, I'd say that intellectual compromise rises to the level of a fine art, a hedonistic achievement which I respect, though I can't imitate it--my own hedonism requires its ethical frame of reference to be in plain sight, accessible, subject to change if reason demands. You might understand Paulus better than I do, since in your work compromise (though a very different kind) has to be the order of the day. You try to help your patients live in the jungle, which must mean plenty of yielding here to gain a little there. Well, what I started to say--Paulus is a good joe. It was Paulus who kindly suggested, away back at the time of my resignation, that I should write such a letter, and he gave me advance permission to send copies to newspapers if I cared to--which I've done. Perhaps some of them will allow my cerebral verbiage to rub for a moment against Miss Americas and Russian face-making.

I wasn't able to start that letter at the time of my resignation. I kept putting it off. For a while--April and most of May--Edith and I were in a suspended mental state, waiting out the appellate decision. I couldn't say it to Edith--(especially since we knew by that time that she was pregnant, your first nephew apparently aiming for next February)--I couldn't say it to her, but after the appeal was denied I never had any hope of the Governor. I know him, a cultured nothing, mentally gelded by the modern political rule, never stick your neck out. Even his fishing trip last week was perfectly predictable.

I began my letter to Paulus after the appeal was denied, and it may be worth something, for the record, but not very much. The memory of newspaper readers is remarkably short, I think. Last week there was the inevitable frenzy over the execution here in Winchester, and I guess elsewhere--I haven't looked at the out-of-town papers. Mostly pointless--all of it, so far as saving Callista's life was concerned--the few reasonable voices drowned out by the crackpots petting their emotions in public. This week--oh, in the houses and bars and restaurants this week I doubt if there's very much talk about Callista Blake. And if a few newspapers publish my letter, or as much of it as will fit comfortably in half a column, most readers will be honestly puzzled: Terence Mann, who the devil's he?

It's natural, you needn't tell me, Jack. We aren't geared to endure sustained high tension very long--though didn't I hear you say once that some patients have surprised you in that respect? The week of the trial was enough to kill Cecil Warner--understandable of course, he must have been ill before it began. I wish you could have met him. I saw him only once after his collapse the night of the verdict. He got home--I think I never told you this--by himself, walked home I believe. His housekeeper called me in the morning because he was asking to see me. His doctor wouldn't let me stay very long--he grew too distressed by the effort to tell me something when words wouldn't come. It was mostly about Callista's letters, something he wanted me to understand, as if I were capable of sitting in judgment--but I was not then, Jack, and never have been. Edith was there too--the first time I'd met her outside the courtroom. Warner said, so far as I can bring back the words: "I couldn't believe the letters wouldn't get through to them. I thought they _had_ to hear the truth in them, the reason and the sweetness--but I was only sending a child into a snake pit." He said: "The guilt's mine, Judge--I've killed her, by trusting human nature." That's when his doctor told me I had to go, but he let Edith stay, easy to see why. She has that ability--I think you've felt it yourself--of sharing her own steadiness. It's a personal magic--I'll never know how she does it. I have, myself, achieved enough tranquillity, mental security, to see me through, especially since our marriage and my resignation from the bench. But I seldom seem able to give others the benefit of it; they are most likely to be irritated because I don't share their excitements of the moment. You have a good deal of her kind of magic yourself.

Well, there at Warner's house she came out to me later, told me how he'd talked more quietly a while, forgetting much of the present, and taking pleasure in the sound of ocean, which no one else would hear in this inland town, but he could hear it out of childhood. He died that night.

My letter to Paulus was, as I said, too cerebral, and that's why it has left me discontented, aware of much that still ought to be said.

In that letter I marshalled all the familiar arguments against capital punishment, for the sake of logic and completeness. Paulus has heard them all, and so have most citizens above the moron level. Capital punishment does not deter, nor have any effect on the crime rate one way or another--repeatedly demonstrated by statistical study long before the time of Warden Lawes; vengeance does not restore life, but only adds another evil, namely murder by the state; there can never be complete assurance that the innocent will not be punished and the guilty go free; punishment itself serves no purpose except to excite the self-deceptive emotions of the punisher; and so on, Jack. While I listed and discussed these and lesser arguments in my letter, I grew increasingly discouraged, mostly by realization that it has all been said before, more persuasively than I know how to say it, that the arguments on the other side seem (at least to my best understanding) monstrously shabby, unrealistic, archaic, some of them plain sadism with its nakedness barely hidden by doubletalk, and yet the laws remain on the books.

You're a headshrinker, Jack--why do so many minds cling to unreason with such a sullen fury? I am thinking of people like Judge Cleever, or people who can read the entire transcript of the Sacco-Vanzetti trial and still declare briskly and earnestly that the innocent are never punished. How do they do it? What's the faculty of the mind that makes it possible for an intelligent being to look directly on a glaring fact and somehow will it out of sight? For my part I _cannot_, from sheer physical inability, believe a lie when the demonstration is before me.

And so finally, when I had done all I could with the clear, sensible, familiar arguments that have beaten on Paulus' head for forty-odd years without ever moving him to act on them, I found that I was closing my discourse with nothing more nor less than a plea for humility.

This was perhaps a little different, a little new--or would have been if I had not felt obliged to write my letter in academic and parliamentary language. I think no one ever said to Mr. Paulus: "You, sir, although an exceptionally decent and clever sample of _Homo quasi-sapiens_, are much too stupid and ignorant to decide whether another human being shall live or die; and so am I, and so are all your colleagues, and all policemen, all Governors, and all juries." I did say, in terms not obscure, that my reason for resigning the judgeship was that I felt my own self incompetent to decide a question of that magnitude. Since he knows I am not a fool, not badly educated as such things go, not grossly inferior to others in my profession, and not given to false modesty, maybe the implications were clear enough to exert some force.

Then having gone so far, it was necessary for the sake of honesty as well as politeness to say what I could for the law on the credit side. You can't (as Callista Blake said) have a human society without laws. The civil law, and with many reservations the criminal law, stumbles and bumbles through a vast amount of necessary work, and not too badly. Concepts broaden, eventually. The law in these years begins to listen more intelligently to your (very young and new) profession, Jack; I predict that quite soon the dear old McNaughton Rule will find its proper place--in historical textbooks. And so long as there are laws, why, the function of a judge is probably required at certain times, and if the judge has intelligence it is a potential means of serving order and human approximations of justice. On the personal level, I admitted to Mr. Paulus that if I had remained in office I could have done much useful work for many years, doing at the same time no more harm than most judges do, and less than some.

But I did not retreat into the formula of declaring that my decision was purely a matter of private conscience. Mr. Paulus may so describe and pigeonhole it, but I did not say that. What is so private about a conscience if it directs the life and actions of a man? I could not soften the implication that any judge who opposes capital punishment and yet remains in office in a state which keeps that on the books is obliged to justify such compromise before the bar of his own reason. He can do that: he can say that his compromise enables him in the long run to do more good than harm. That is honest; that I can respect. But I say, let him remember that it is still a compromise with evil. And I say also that it cannot be my way.

I think that in the end all honest reasoning does arrive at the necessity of humility. In effect you say to all your patients: "I don't know much about you, you don't know much about yourself; let's try to find out more, and make what use of it we can, and remember then that we still don't know very much." Or as my own dearest teacher used to say to me: "Bring out the inner voices." No one ever knew all he was capable of learning, or all he needed to learn. The individual self is the heart of everything we understand, the world's endless complexity being the product of all individual selves living and dead. About the self of another we know one thing for certain and only one: it exists. Therefore, not as a supernatural dictum but as the command of a human being to himself: Thou shalt not kill. Therefore, more light! Therefore, humility.

I am one of the fortunate of course. I think, Jack, that by next September I can decently start teaching music--with humility, at least something of the strength and humility that I felt in my teacher Michael Brooks but was too much of a child to understand. I shall write books and articles--I told Callista that; or rather I agreed, for it was the first thing she thought of when she learned of my resignation from the bench, and all I had to say was yes. I have a redheaded wife who doesn't allow dull moments, though we have many peaceful ones, and we shall have children who will undoubtedly teach me a good deal about humility, if only through the slow and touchy business of learning it themselves. But Edith and I will not turn smug and insulated with our good fortune, I think--we know and remember too much for that.

I was able to see Callista several times in the death house. I remember I wrote you a little about some of those visits, probably not too well. The first time was right after my resignation. I felt I had to see her and talk to her, if only for my own sake. It was no crawling search for "forgiveness"--she would have thought that absurd and contemptible; she knew (I think) as well as I know, that during the trial I was partly a mechanism on the bench, partly a bewildered and rather inexperienced man who liked her and did not want her to die. But I was undeniably in search of understanding. She was someone who had gone into regions I had never known--not all of them dark and fearful either, for surely her brilliance, insight, humor, daydreams, were quite as meaningful as her suffering. She was also someone who was articulate, observant, wise, and could therefore tell me something of those regions, if she was willing. In meeting Callista you somehow by-passed "forgiveness" and other vanities. I think it was because, when she was not too unhappy, she was often able to speak from mind and heart at the same time. She had no acidulous interest in puncturing sham for the sake of puncturing it. It was simply that, once friendship and communication were established, she was so straightforward and clear-minded that one's own shams and self-deceptions showed themselves up as abominations, and one could only wish to be rid of them, and to exist for a while on her level. She would never have thought of asking a friend to be honest; she merely took it for granted that he would be, took it for granted with an innocence and uncalculated kindness that even Edith says she can't understand.

Never suppose that Callista wanted to die. She wanted life, and all it might have brought her. She followed closely and hopefully everything that we were trying to do, the appeal, the later efforts. She was happy and intensely _interested_ when she learned that Edith and I had become close friends and then lovers; it was Callista who urged us to marry without too much waiting. She wanted to know everything about this Emmetville house we've bought--yes, I listen for The Express, though it's always a Diesel now and doesn't sound quite right to you and me--and she seemed to get a wholly relaxed, natural fun out of telling us how to fix the guest room where she would sometimes be staying. When I told her of Edith's pregnancy (not even sure that I ought to) she was happy--I swear there was not one moment in the little time I had with her that day when I could see any shadow on her face, any hint that she was comparing Edith's lot with her own. Later of course, after I was gone--but no one will ever know about that.

And in spite of all this, her manifest interest in living, I think she sensed all the time that the appeal would probably fail, and the appeal for executive clemency. Once or twice--only once or twice--she was bitter and miserable. I will not make a saint of her, and so lose what she really was. She was greater in many ways than most of us; she was also a nineteen-year-old girl, unfortunate, frequently sharp-tongued and hasty; loving beyond measure to her friends but incapable of suffering a fool with patience. Once, only once, I saw her truly angry. Well, she had said to Warden Sharpe himself that she wanted no visits from the chaplain, and then after respecting her wish for quite a long time he had come in anyhow, poor earnest man, and prayed at her--just unable, in his good intentions, to understand that there really are those who prefer to employ their minds in other ways, especially when the time is short. But I found out on talking with her, after her anger had given way to amusement, that what had chiefly exasperated her was her inability to recall chapter and verse numbers for the quotation from Exodus she wanted to cite to him: "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." (It's XXII, 18, if you're curious.) She said: "I did want to give him just the numbers so he'd have the fun of looking it up himself."

Later, unsmiling, she asked me: "Will it accomplish something, do you think, if I'm able to demonstrate with what peace a freethinker can die?"

She was like that. She could say that, and saying it, compel me to answer straightforwardly instead of with a mere desperate insistence that I didn't think she would die. I said: "Yes." Then of course I was driven to say the other thing too, because, like Edith and Cecil, I loved her and I could not look at the thought of her death. But the yes was what she wanted and what she remembered.

She would not permit me to be present at the execution. She said I must stay with Edith at that hour, and that was right, and I did so. We lived through the time--I don't care to remember any of it except that Edith took hold of my hand and held it above the life growing in her body, until the minute hand had gone past that mark.

Warden Sharpe has told me there was "no confusion." Callista walked alone--of course. Sharpe says she smiled suddenly at the chaplain, patted his arm, said: "It's all right. Come with us if you want to." When they strapped her in the chair she said only: "You people here are not responsible for any of this. I'd like you to know I understand that." Then the hood was over her face, and an employee of the sovereign state moved the switch to perform on her body the ultimate indecency.

She was one of the lonely and strange. Though we destroy them, they give us a light that can become our own.

THE TRIAL OF CALLISTA BLAKE

EDGAR PANGBORN

In 1959, in the state of New Essex, a witch was on trial. Or so she seemed to many of the jurors who would ultimately decide her fate, and to the people who thronged the crowded courtroom, many of them friends of the murdered woman. On trial for poisoning her former lover's wife, she would--if found guilty--be executed.

Callista Blake is nineteen years old at the time of her trial. She has a very slight physical deformity, and the much greater mental ones of apparent aloofness, fierce independence of mind, a laconic and sometimes sarcastic wit, marked but unconventional artistic talent, avowed atheism, and a complete inability to compromise. Added to all this, although she is not beautiful by any of the usual criteria, men find her overwhelmingly attractive. No wonder the good people of Winchester and Shanesville dislike her, fear her, and, subconsciously, at least, think she is a witch. No wonder they do not believe Callista's story that she had mixed the deadly potion of Monkshood and brandy for herself at a moment of suicidal depression, and had been prevented by a miscarriage from saving Nancy Doherty, who had drunk the stuff accidentally. The circumstantial evidence against Callista could not be more damning, yet there are one or two people unshakeably convinced of her innocence.

This is the story of their struggle in the courtroom to save her. On her side are one witness--Edith Nolan, her friend and former employer--her defending counsel--Cecil Warner, a sick, aging man who loves her--and Terence Mann, who in his role as judge is obliged to attempt impartiality but, trying his first case carrying the death penalty, is appalled that the fate of a human being can be at the mercy of anything so haphazard as the adversary system and the whim of a jury. We see Callista's ordeal and the events that brought her to it from the viewpoints of all these people, as well as that of Callista herself. We see T. J. Hunter, the formidable District Attorney (they call him hunter Hunter), Jim Doherty, only too willing to accept his confessor's view that he was an innocent ensnared by a temptress of whom he is now happily free, Callista's well-meaning stepfather, hopelessly dominated by her overbearing, histrionic mother, the perfect Gertrude to Callista's Hamlet, and many others who indirectly hold Callista's life in their hands. We gradually learn the history of Callista's passionate affair with Jim, told with a compassion and insight which contrast poignantly with the chilling ritual of the courtroom.

Edgar Pangborn knows and understands the people he writes about. And with irresistible force he shows that no one is good enough or wise enough to hold the power of life and death.

Mr. Pangborn, who lives at Vorheesville, New York, attended Harvard and the New England Conservatory of Music. He is the author of three previous novels: _West of the Sun_, (1952), _A Mirror for Observers_ (1953), and _Wilderness of Spring_ (1958). He has also contributed short stories to various magazines.

_Jacket design by Paul Bacon_

_ST MARTIN'S PRESS_

* * * * *

Transcriber's Note, continued:

In general every effort has been made to replicate the original text as faithfully as possible, including some instances of non-standard spelling and punctuation (for example, ellipses spacing and size). Hyphenation has been standardized. The transcriber notes that one of the main characters, "Ann Doherty," is anomalously referred to as "Nancy" once on p. 43, and again in the jacket flap notes; this has not been altered. Another main character is often referred to by his initials, "T. J."; on p. 79 and beyond this becomes "T.J."; this has also not been altered.

The following changes were made to repair apparently typographical errors:

copyright statement below title page "for permisison to use a" permisison changed to permission p. 28 "eatingly loudly and cheerfully" eatingly changed to eating p. 68 "There she goes snifflling" snifflling changed to sniffling p. 94 "Walton Road betwen 9:10" betwen changed to between p. 111 "my own langugage far simpler" langugage changed to language p. 121 "solitary as as any other" as as changed to as p. 121 "instance: What do do?" first do changed to to p. 122 "Adante does not mean Adagio" Adante changed to Andante p. 206 "I'll be such an actesss" actesss changed to actress p. 228 "doddle-pad rather angrily crossed" doddle changed to doodle p. 246 "a fairly advanced science notice" notice changed to noticed p. 275 "and then--"to keep you and me" --"to changed to --'to jacket flap text "her defending council" council changed to counsel

End of Project Gutenberg's The Trial of Callista Blake, by Edgar Pangborn