Read Ebook: Under the Law by Babcock Edwina Stanton Coleman Ralph P Ralph Pallen Illustrator

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Under the Law

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The streets between Willow Roads and the little town of Morris on the Hudson were still corrugated with March thaw. But the sun shone warmly and there was the wet smell of oncoming spring in the air. Women flung open their coats at the neck; children skipped lightly to school. The river took on an ethereal light that to the shadmen meant the time when their soggy boats would be moored to the long lines of stakes near the channel. The country highways were less hopeless with mud, and the spring tramp began appearing at back doors.

A girl, driving her car rather absently through the unimaginative streets of Morris, stopped suddenly at sight of a ring of loafers gathered by the curb in a side street, jeering mildly and apparently baiting a tumbled heap of something in the gutter. What was it? A dog? A child? Sard Bogart, her brown eyes alert, sprang from her car and went over to see.

As the girl approached the group, one or two of the older and better dressed townspeople edged rather shamefacedly away. The village postman, hailing the girl loquaciously, explained, "Just one of them Gloomy Guses. They come out like turtles this time of the year. This feller has likely stole a ride on a freight car and been dumped off at West Morris. Seems he's trying to pertend he don't know who he is. That ain't hard for a tramp; ain't nobody anyhow." The postman scratched his head, wishing to cover all aspects of the matter. "Ef he's drunk, it's a new kind of drunk. Vanilla extract, they tell me, is what this kind boozes on nowadays." To the girl's indignant question, "Oh, they ain't doing him no harm; just worrying him a little to see him act funny. The authorities?" the postman looked a little vague. "Well, I should say, it being about noon, that the authorities has gone home to their dinners."

The young figure crossed the street and approached the jeering loafers absorbed in prodding the helpless bundle of humanity in the gutter. They shoved it from side to side as they demanded, "Say, where's yer wife? Where'd ye come from? We'll tell yer where to get off! Say, Jack, where do you keep the stuff? You tell me, I won't let anybody know."

More comments of a humorous nature were made for the benefit of the girl approaching. "He ain't so handsome when ye come close up." One wag hushed the others elaborately. "No, mebbe it's some friend of this young lady's. Say, take him for a ride, Miss. I'll bet he ain't never had one."

"Give him a shave first," urged one gum-chewing youth. There was violent nudging from a rather stout woman in the group. "Shut up! Ain't you got no sense? That's Judge Bogart's daughter." Then to railing unbelief, "Sure it is. Ain't I washed down to her house a hundred times? Hullo, Miss Bogart, ain't it terrible how these fellers is treating that poor drunk?"

At the voice, the girl lifted her concerned gaze from the sight of the wretched figure sitting now on the curbstone, both bleeding shoe-wrecked feet in the gutter.

"Mrs. Croyder, this is pitiful. Why doesn't someone do something? Why do the authorities permit people to be tormented like this?"

Mrs. Croyder, as one not accustomed to question the vagaries of the authorities, was a little vague.

"Well, now, Mr. Snowgen, that's the policeman, wouldn't never hear to anything like it, but he's gone home to his dinner."

"Then the traffic police?" The girl looked about her eagerly.

"They've gone home to their dinners,"

The soft girlish tones seemed hardly to penetrate to the consciousness of the tramp. He did not look up nor try to answer. At last, in response to the prodding toe of a village gamin and his challenge, "Say, ain't you got no manners? The lady is speakin' to yer," the head, sunk between the shivering shoulders, was raised with a sodden, uncomprehending look. Then the man, ragged, unshaven, with an unspeakable look of abandoned misery, did a strange thing. He struggled, shaking as with palsy, to his feet. There was a week's reddish growth of beard on his white face; his voice, very feeble, stammered and was lost in places, but he replied slowly, "Can--can you read that name in my hat? Perhaps there is an address there, I don't know. I can't remember." With a hand like a claw, the tramp pointed to a wrinkled cap lying in the gutter.

Sard, seeing him sway as though he would pitch forward, put out an arm to steady him. At this, a passer-by came up to her and, without a word, supported the collapsing man on the other side. This youth smiled sympathetically.

"Is there anything I can do, Miss Bogart?"

The girl turned sharply. "Mr. Lowden," then with a little air of relief, "this man seems dazed, sick. Oughtn't we get help? Oughtn't we to do something?"

"Wait till Snowgen gets back from his dinner," bawled the chorus of loafers. A dozen voices advised, "Snowgen will put him in the lock-up, and if he can't prove anything, they'll send him up for vagrancy. Here's his hat. No, ma'am, I wouldn't touch it if I was you; that ain't no hat fer a lady to hold." One of the group, with effects of delicate shrinking, held the wretched headgear so that the girl could read a name written with ink on a piece of tape stitched inside on the lining. There were two initials smutted beyond recognition, but she could distinguish the surname "Colter." With a curious little gesture of courtesy, she bent to the pitiful figure she was helping support, asking gravely and distinctly, "Mr. Colter, you are in trouble. Can we help you? Is there anything we can do for you?"

The shaking hand was held out for the cap. Some bystander with rough hand jammed it on the tumbled head of thick auburn hair, but the tramp feebly removed it. He turned slowly, staring into the girl's face. His eyes, of a very intense blue, were large and unnaturally bright, as from fever.

"Thank you," he said weakly. Then with a swift glance full of unnameable shame, "Please don't worry about me. I am only going to find work--somewhere," The man closed his eyes, muttering,

Sard Bogart turned to the youth who was helping her. "Will you come with me?" she appealed. He nodded.

"I am going to drive this poor thing to that little boarding-house on Norman Street. I know the woman who keeps it. It is quiet and clean."

The circle of loafers tittered. "Say, lady, wait till Snowgen gets back from his dinner. Snowgen can take the feller to the right boarding-house, all right."

The girl, for answer, smiled good-humoredly. "Mr. Snowgen can interview this man after he has been fed and can speak for himself. Just at present, Mr. Lowden and I will take charge."

Lowden, the young assistant of the Morris Bank, frowned on any more suggestions, and together the man and girl supported the wretched figure to the car. Together they somehow got it to a seat. Then the young fellow watched Sard with admiration as she calmly drove with her rather dubious-looking passenger through the staring streets of Morris.

The girl was silent, and the young banker made but one observation. "Small town life breeds a thirst for sensation, doesn't it? It never gets mentally to the economic questions lying back of the sensation."

"It is still the Binet Test, fourteen-year-old mind," laughed the girl.

As the car halted before the little boarding-house on Norman Street, Lowden begged, "I wish you'd let me handle all the rest."

The girl turned her eyes on him. "You think I may meet with awkward things?"

The young banker was evasive. "Let's remember we are rather a mean little town," he said simply. "Please leave it all to me. I'll do exactly as you say."

The girl's grave look rested on the wreck of a man sitting in a heap beside her, his head sunk on his chest, his ragged coat open and showing his bare, famished-looking chest, his white lips muttering feebly.

"I want him put to bed and fed--very lightly at first. I want him bathed and shaved, after a doctor has seen him. I want him either sent to the hospital here at my expense or, when he is strong enough, to come to my father for work. I want him to be sure, sure, he has friends. I want him," the quick tears came into her young eyes, "to feel that he has another chance."

The youth nodded, his eyes on hers. This was Sard Bogart, the Judge's daughter, who had been back from college only a few months. It was understood in the villages of Morris and Willow Roads that Miss Bogart was a "queer," lonely girl, impatient of many things, apt to be impulsive and to do impolitic and "unpopular" things. This was one of the things--pulling a muddy gutter-snipe out of the gutter. Yet the light in the girl's clear brown eyes was a new and grateful thing to the young bank officer. Somehow he felt as if he had never looked into a fine woman's eyes before. He took his orders gladly and with sober admiration. "And keep me in touch, won't you?" The girl leaned from the car, laying her commands on him. He lifted his hat gravely.

Lowden alighted and helped down the ragged vagrant. His gentleness was like Sard's own. The girl, watching this gentleness, saw the broken figure of the man try to turn once--try to look back at her. "Yes?" said the girl "Yes?" Then her eyes, warm with pity, "Wait a moment, please, Mr. Lowden. Yes, Colter, what is it you want to say?"

But she could not understand. She saw only a shaken, shivering man muttering, "I can't remember," and again the stammering sentence, "I can't remember."

UNDER THE LAW

The house faced on the river. The massive hills that turned bronze in the setting sun were irregular background for the white castle-like buildings on the eastern banks. But the western shore of the Hudson had set between small mountains little, hilly-looking villages; among them were the Dutch towns, Morris and Willow Roads, whose old roofs, slowly giving way to factories and churches of one period, were at last disappearing before the real estate man's idea of a suburban development. At the edge of this development were the far-apart homes of the well-to-do and the long lines of green lawns; the rich trees and tinted shrubberies were illumined and laced with a thousand lovely colors of massed iris and waving tulips set, like the gardens on the river, against royal purple of opposite shores.

Sard's room was in the square tower of the house her father had built in his more grandiloquent days. If the Judge's wife had lived, they might have lengthened and strengthened the home into something like a practical sunny house of our day, but as it was, the curious construction of red sandstone and black and white Tudor retained its perplexed conglomerate air, only saved from freakishness by the soft mantle of vines that ruffled the chimney and girdled its windows. All around to the sloping banks of the river were the trees that the Judge's father had planted and tended into maturity. It was a League of Nations in Trees! English maples, Norway spruces, lindens, horse-chestnuts from Versailles, Japanese maples and Greek planes and orange trees from along the Mediterranean. To Sard, since her very first party dress, those trees had seemed a sort of litany; the noble forms of every clime and country raised their mysterious crests, sought with yearning roots, were full of the first murmur of June-bee days; waved like women the soft undulations of their shapes, bathed in blue morning or loomed in formless grandeur on the night.

It was a puzzle to Sard that these trees kept to the laws of their growth in one soil.

The windows of Sard's room opened to the four winds and gave on the tree-fringed expanse of water. At night those tower panes were literally dashed with stars. As a little girl she had lain watching their fairy dance like fire-flies; later her clear brown eyes became fixed thoughtfully on what seemed strings of jasmine-like blossoms. Coming home from boarding-school, the stars half thrilled her with mystical trailing blossoms of a home-sky, but now of late, after college and a new sense of values, these stars had suddenly ceased throwing their soft lights across the panes. East, west, north and south, they now stood in an awful order like knights leaning on spears. They were challenging in their geometry, severe in their puzzling fixity; they seemed to say--"Well, Sard, you are grown up now; you make your own choices; what is your law? We have our law--have you discovered yours?"

During two years at college Sard had thought little about "law." The stars there had asked few questions. They had seemed companionable, dashing confidently, shining over the campus with capricious groups of girls; they had shone on bright camp-fires and twinkled at the saucy songs shouted into their very eyes. The college stars had seemed to vibrate like sleigh-bells to such defiant songs as "Where, oh death, is thy stingalingaling?" and they thrilled to a thousand funny whistles and calls of a rather self-consciously emphasized youth. But here they were back with their spell and their question. Knights with spears, they rode softly past the window-panes, keeping their geometric order, saying, insistently--"This is our law; we obey always. What is your law?"

At first the thing had awed Sard, then saddened her. So after all, the world physical went on this grand orderly, terrible sort of way, and so did the spiritual world seem to, no matter how much one wanted to change things; but the world of people and purpose? how about that?

What should be the laws of one's life? The books on Sard's shelves gleamed in the moonlight. Here and there they had helped and suggested and one or two men or women Sard had met seemed to have an idea. Then this thing they called "Love"--Sard, lying in bed, pondered; did love do what people said it did, sweeten, make deeper, wiser? Well, Sard had seen girls at college who became engaged, said they were in love, certainly were changed and made queer by a force bigger than themselves; and yet it all seemed to end trivially. One or two children, a little house not very well kept, a tired husband, not "enough" money ... and there were other girls who mocked at love and played with it and coquetted until their faces became cynical, hard and horrible.... If there were things that swept people so they rose bigger and finer than they had ever dreamed themselves to be, that might count some way, but how did they start becoming bigger and finer? One couldn't go down-stairs and announce to one's family--"From now on I am going to be bigger and finer." So, tossing away from the star inquiry, turning penitently back to it, the young form fought out the thing. A sense of awful loneliness and youth came to Sard, an awful sense of not knowing herself, not working from the most inward of her. She stretched out appealing arms--"What are my laws?" she asked softly. "Oh, what are my laws?" For Sard knew, and knew with feelings of awe that for every life that counted there must be laws.

BY-LAWS

The Judge opened the door and propelled himself into the room in a finicking, faultfinding way, peculiarly inappropriate to his massive shoulders and head. He grunted something to Sard's "Good-morning, Dad," picked up his paper and flapped it into a fold. His slow eyes, seeming like ground glass set in front of the remorseless deliberations of his mind, paused at the coffee-urn, as he made inquiry:

"Dunstan not down yet?"

For answer Dunstan Bogart shuffled down the broad stairs and, slipping on a rug, entered the dining-room with an operatic air of being in extreme haste. Half tumbling into the room, he halted, dramatically, appearing to remind himself that the breakfast-room was holy ground. "Greeting to thee, fellow sufferers," he announced cheerfully. He made passes at his father's back, stared his aunt solemnly in the face, ruffled Sard's hair and finally took his seat.

"Frogs in the finger-bowls again?" he questioned sepulchrally. "Else why all this gloom?"

The Judge, unnoticing, motioned his finished grapefruit away. No one appearing to effect this transfer, he indicated the butler's pantry back of him and Sard felt anew for the electric bell.

"I wonder if this thing works--it doesn't seem to ring in the kitchen."

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