The Empty Sack Part 53

Teddy laughed sheepishly, as if he had ventured to peer into secrets which were none of his business.

"I'll tell you the way G.o.d seems to me-it's all come to me while I've been in there." He nodded toward the cells. "I don't seem to get him as a great big man, the way the chaplain says he is. He's all right, the chaplain, only he don't seem to know anything about G.o.d. He can gas away to beat the band about law, and society, and the good of the community, and h.e.l.l to pay when you don't respect them; but when it comes to G.o.d-it's nix."

"Well, what do you make out for yourself?"

"I haven't made it out exactly. It's as if some great big hand had pulled aside a curtain-but it's a curtain that I didn't know was there.

See?"

"Yes, I see. And what does it show you?"

"That's the funny part of it. I can't tell you what it shows me. I don't exactly see it; I only know-mind you, I'm just telling you how it seems to me-I only know that it's G.o.d."

"But I suppose, if you know that it's G.o.d, you have an idea of what it's like?"

"Ye-es; it's like-like a country into which I'm traveling-not with my body-see?-but with my _self_. No," he corrected, "that's not it. It isn't a country; it's more like a life. Oh, shucks! I haven't got it straight yet. Now look! This is the way it is. Suppose that everything we see was alive-that these chairs were alive, and the walls, and the table-that every blamed thing we ever touch or use was alive, and had a voice. See?" Bob nodded that he saw. "Now, suppose every voice was trying to make you understand things. The table would say, 'This is the way G.o.d wants you to work'; and the chair, 'This is the way G.o.d wants you to rest'; and the walls, 'This is the way G.o.d stands round you and backs you up.' Everything would be helping you then, instead of putting itself dead against you the way we have it here."

"I get the idea; but would that be G.o.d?"

Over this question the boy's face brooded thoughtfully.

"It mightn't be G.o.d in the way that you're you and I'm me. It would be more like a way of _knowing_ G.o.d. It's like my case in the courts. It's set down as 'The People against Edward S. Follett.' But I don't see the People; I only feel what they do to me. It's something like that. I don't see G.o.d; but I kind of feel-" He broke with another apologetic laugh. "Oh, I guess it's all wrong. Gussie'd call me a gump. It just kind of gets you; that's all. It makes me feel as if I was moving on into something-but I guess I'm not."

The pensive silence that followed was broken by Bob's saying:

"That's what I mean by instinct."

Teddy resumed as if he hadn't heard. "When I wake up in the night-and waking up in the night in that place, with snores and groans and guys talking in their sleep and having nightmares, is some stunt, believe _me_-but when I do, it's just as if I had great big arms round me, and some one was saying: 'All right, Teddy, I'm holding you. Keep a stiff upper lip. I'll make it as easy as I can for you and everyone else. I'm just drawing you-drawing you-drawing you-a wee little bit at a time-over here, where you'll get your big chance.' What's more, Bob," he went on, as if he touched on the heart of his interest, "it says it'll take care of Flynn and his wife and his poor little kiddies, and do the things-"

Once more he broke off with his uneasy laugh. "Ah, what's the use? You think I'm a quitter, don't you?"

"Why should I think that?"

"Oh, I don't know. I talk like a quitter. But it isn't that. If I could still do anything for ma and the girls-"

"I'm looking after them, old boy."

"So there you are. What'd be the good of my staying?" He added, between clenched teeth, "G.o.d, how I'd hate to go back!"

"Back into the world?"

He spoke as if to himself: "You see-that day-the day the thing happened-and they came and caught me-and did all those things to me-and I saw Flynn lying by the road-it was-it was a kind of sickener. If putting me out of the way is the thing in the wind, it was done right there and then. Right there and then I seem to have begun-moving on." He drew a long breath. "And I'd rather keep moving, Bob-no matter to where-no matter to what-than turn back again to face a bunch of men."

CHAPTER XXVII

Teddy was not called on to face a bunch of men till going to the courtroom for his trial. Dressed long before the hour in a new dark-blue suit, fresh linen, and a dark-blue tie, his prison pallor, a little like that of death, put him out of the list of the active and free. As he sat on the edge of his bunk, somber with dread, he was nevertheless obliged to find suitable jocosities with which to answer the good-luck wishes that came slithering along the walls from the neighboring cells. It was half past nine before two guards whom he had never seen before, stalwart fellows well over six feet, came to the door and unlocked it.

"Ready, Follett? Time's come."

Springing to his feet, he found handcuffs slipped round his wrists before he was aware of what was being done. It was an unexpected indignity. He had never been handcuffed before.

"Say, fellows," he protested, "I'll go all right. I don't want these on me."

"Come along wid ye."

The words were friendly rather than rough, as was also the hand of a guard on each shoulder as they steered him along the corridor. The Brig is a rambling building, or succession of buildings, with courthouse and house of detention under the same series of roofs. The pilgrimage was long-upstairs, downstairs, through pa.s.sages, past offices, past courtrooms, with guards, police, clerks, lawyers, litigants, loungers, standing about everywhere. The sight of a man in handcuffs arrested all eyes for the moment, and stilled all tongues. With his glances flying from right to left and from left to right, Teddy again began to feel the sense of separation from the human race which had struck to his soul that day on the marshes.

Of his other impressions, the chief was that of squalor. It seemed as if all the elements had been brought together that would make poor Justice vulgar and unimpressive. Out of a squalid cell he had been pushed along squalid hallways, through groups of squalid faces, into a squalid courtroom, where he was ushered into a squalid cage, long and narrow, with a seat hardly wider than a knife blade. Once within the cage the handcuffs were taken off, the door was locked, and each of the stalwart guards took his stand at one end. The cage being raised some six or eight inches above the level of the floor, the boy was well in sight of everyone. It was like being on a throne-or a Calvary.

On taking his seat, he was vaguely conscious of a bank of faces, tier above tier, at the back of the courtroom. Before him some fifteen or twenty officials, reporters, and lawyers lolled at their tables, walked about, yawned, picked their teeth, or told anecdotes that raised a smothered laugh. Most of them struck him as untidily dressed; few looked intelligent. Among them a portly man, whom he afterward saw as the district attorney, in a cutaway coat, with a line of pique at the opening of his waistcoat, seemed like a person in fancy costume.

Everyone paused as he entered the cage, but, a glance having satisfied their curiosity, they paid him no further attention.

The trial lasted three days, pa.s.sing before his eyes like a motion-picture film of which he was only a spectator. Try as he would, he found it hard to believe that the proceedings had anything to do with him. "All this fuss," he would comment to himself, grimly, "to get the right to kill a man." The strain of being under so many cruel or indifferent eyes sent him back with relief to his cell, where during the nights he slept soundly.

His one bit of surprise came from Stenhouse's final argument in his defense. Up to that point, both defense and prosecution had struck him as more or less silly. The state had tried to prove him a desperado whom it was dangerous to let live; the defense had done its best to show him a youth of arrested intelligence, not responsible for his acts. He grinned inwardly when Jennie, Gussie, and half a dozen of his old chums testified to foolish pranks, forgotten or half forgotten by himself, in the hope of convincing the court that he had never had the normal sense.

But Stenhouse in his concluding speech transcended all that, taking Teddy's own stand as the only one which offered the ghost of a chance of acquittal. He began his final appeal quietly, in a tone little more than colloquial.

"There's an old saying, a variant on something said by Benjamin Franklin, which we might remember oftener than we do. It's terse, pithy, humorous, wise. Some one has called it the finest bit of free verse composed in the eighteenth century. Listen to it. '_It is hard to make an empty sack stand upright._' So it is. The empty sack collapses of its own accord. It can't do anything but collapse. It was not meant to stand upright. To demand that it shall stand upright is to insist on the impossible. A full sack will stand as solid as a tree. A group of full sacks will support one another. Put the empty sack among them and from the very law of gravitation it will go down helplessly. Now, gentlemen of the jury, you're being asked to bring in a verdict against the empty sack-the sack that's been carefully kept empty-because it hasn't the strength and stability of that which all the coffers of the country have combined to fill."

With this as a text, Stenhouse drew a picture of the industrious man who is limited by the very nature of his industry. He is not limited by his own desire, but by the use society wishes to make of him. Serving a turn, he is schooled to serve that turn, and to serve no other turn.

This schooling takes him unawares. He doesn't know it has begun before waking to find himself drilled to a system from which only a giant can escape. Few men being giants, the average man plods on because he doesn't know what else to do. There is rarely anything else _for_ him to do. Having taken the first ill-paid job that comes his way, he hasn't meant to give himself to it all his life. He dreams of something bigger, more brilliant, more productive. The boy who runs errands sees himself a merchant; the lad who becomes a clerk looks forward to being a partner; the young man who enters a bank is sure that some day he will be bank president.

"Sometimes, gentlemen, these early visions work out to a reality. But in the vast majority of cases, the youth, before he ceases to be a youth, finds himself where the horse is when he has once submitted to the bridle. He can go only as he is driven. Life is organized not to let him go in any other way. Needing him for a certain purpose, it keeps him to that purpose. Work, taken as a great corporate thing, is made up of hundreds of millions of tiny tasks each of which calls for a man. The man being found, he must be trimmed to the size of his task."

Stenhouse had no quarrel with methods universally followed by civilized man. To criticize them was not his intention, as it was not his intention to complain because man had not yet brought in the Golden Age.

"But I do claim that the smaller the task to which a man is nailed down, and the smaller the pay he is able to earn, the greater the responsibility of collective society toward that individual."

There was a time, he declared, when much had been said to the discredit of slavery; but one thing could be urged in its favor. The man who had been kept throughout his life to one small job was not thrown out in his old age to provide for himself as he could. Having worked for society, as society was const.i.tuted then, society recognized at least the duty of taking care of him. Stenhouse disclaimed any comparison between free American labor and a servile condition; he was striving only for a principle. Men couldn't be screwed down during all their working lives to the lowest wage on which body and soul could be kept together, and then be judged by the same standards as those who had had opportunity to make provision for themselves and their families. The same interpretation of the law couldn't be made to cover the cases of the full sack and the empty one.

"And yet," he went on, changing his tone with his theme, "the empty sack is of value because it can be filled. Coa.r.s.e, cheap, negligible as it seems, it is much too good to throw away. It is an a.s.set to production, to the country's trade, to the whole world's wealth. And, gentlemen, what shall we say when we call that empty sack-a man?"

The value of the human a.s.set was the next point to which he led his listeners.

"It is only a truism to say that among all the precious things with which the Almighty has blessed his creation the most precious is a human life; and yet we live in a world which seems to believe this so little that we must sometimes remind ourselves that it is so. Within a few years we have seen millions of men reckoned merely as _stuff_. As productive a.s.sets to the race, they haven't counted. We could read of a day's loss on the battlefield running up into the thousands and never turn a hair. We came to regard a young man's life as primarily a thing to throw away. It is for this reason, gentlemen of the jury, that I venture to remind you that a young man's life is primarily a thing to save. It may be a truism to say that a human life is the most precious of all created things; but it is a truism of which we are only now, to our bitter and incalculable cost, beginning to realize the truth."

He went on to draw a picture of the contributions to the general good made by the Folletts, father and son. Their work had been humble, but it had been essential. Essential work faithfully performed should guarantee an old age protected against penury. He reminded his hearers that he was not opposed to the law of supply and demand, which was the only known method by which the business of the world could be carried on. He only pleaded for the same humanity to a man as was shown to a broken-down old horse. From his one interview with Lizzie, Stenhouse had got what he called "the good line," "_Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn._" Of this he now made use, following it up with St. Paul's explanation: "Doth G.o.d take care for oxen? Or saith he it altogether for our sakes? For our sakes, no doubt, this is written: that he that ploweth may plow in hope; and that he that thresheth in hope should be partaker of his hope."

"Gentlemen, so long as we live in a society in which the vast majority of us can never be partakers of the hope with which we started out, so long must justice take account of the suffering of the poor muzzled brute that treadeth out the corn. If he goes frenzied and runs amuck, he cannot be judged by the standards which apply to him who has been left unmuzzled and free to satisfy his wants. It is not fair; it is not human. It is true that to protect your own interests you have the power to shoot him down; but when he lies dead at your feet, no more muzzled in death than he was in life, there is surely somewhere in the universe an avenging force that is on his side, and which will make you-you as representatives of the society which has placed its action in your hands-and you as twelve private individuals with duties and consciences-there is somewhere in the universe this avenging force which will require his blood at your hands and make you pay the penalty.

Surely you can find a better use for that valuable a.s.set, a young man's life, than just to take it away. For the sake of the public whose honor is in your keeping, you must play the game squarely. For the sake of your own future peace of mind, you must not add your own crime to this poor boy's misfortune. Your duty at this minute is not merely to interpret the dead letter of a law; it is to be the voice of the People whom you represent. Remember that by the verdict you bring in that People will be committed to the most destructive of all destructive acts, or it will get expression for that deep, human common sense which transcends written phrases to act in the spirit of the greatest of us all, judging not according to the appearance-not according to the appearance, gentlemen, and you remember who counseled that-but judging righteous judgment."

He fell back into his seat, exhausted. He was so impressive and impa.s.sioned as to convince many of his hearers that he believed his own plea, while to some who had considered the verdict a certainty it was now in doubt.

Among Teddy's friends a hope arose that, in spite of all expectation to the contrary, he might be saved. Bob looked over and smiled. Teddy smiled back, but mainly because he rejoiced in what he felt to be his justification. He couldn't see how they could convict him after such a setting forth as that, though for the consequences of acquittal he had so little heart.

In the excitement of the courtroom, the judge's voice, when he began to give the jury their instructions, fell like cool, quiet rain on thunderous sultriness. He was a small man, with a leathery, unemotional face, framed by an iron-gray wig of faultless side-parting and long, straight, unnaturally smooth hair. He had the faculty of seeming attentive without being influenced. Listening, reasoning, asking a question, or settling a disputed point, he gave the impression of having reduced intelligence to the soulless accuracy of a cash register.