As she turned into Main Street the intelligence that she was coming seemed in some mysterious way to speed before her. Those exemplars of male fashion, the dry goods clerks, craned furtively about front doors. Bare-armed and aproned proprietors of grocery stores and their hirelings appeared beneath the awnings and displayed an unprecedented concern in trying to resuscitate, with aid of sprinkling-cans, bunches of expiring radishes and young onions. Owners of amiable steeds that dozed beside the curb hurried out of cavernous doors, the fear of run-away writ large upon their countenances, to see if a buckle was not loose or a tug perchance unfastened. Behind her, as she passed, Main Street stood statued in mid-action, strap in motionless hand, sprinkling-can tilting its entire contents of restorative over a box of clothes-pins, and gaped and stared. This was epochal for Westville. Never before had a real, live, practising woman lawyer trod the cement walk of Main Street.
When Katherine came to Court House Square, she crossed to the south side, passed the Express Building, and made for the Hollingsworth Block, whose first floor was occupied by the New York Store’s “glittering array of vast and profuse fashion.” Above this alluring pageant were two floors of offices; and up the narrow stairway leading thereunto Katherine mounted. She entered a door marked “Hosea Hollingsworth. Attorney-at-Law. Mortgages. Loans. Farms.” In the room were a table, three chairs, a case of law books, a desk, on the top of the desk a “plug” hat, so venerable that it looked a very great-grandsire of hats, and two cuspidors marked with chromatic evidence that they were not present for ornament alone.
From the desk there rose a man, perhaps seventy, lean, tall, smooth-shaven, slightly stooped, dressed in a rusty and wrinkled “Prince Albert” coat, and with a countenance that looked a rank plagiarism of the mask of Voltaire. In one corner of his thin mouth, half chewed away, was an unlighted cigar.
“I believe this is Mr. Hollingsworth?” said Katherine. The question was purely formal, for his lank figure was one of her earliest memories.
“Yes. Come right in,” he returned in a high, nasal voice.
She drew a chair away from the environs of the cuspidors and sat down. He resumed his place at his desk and peered at her through his spectacles, and a dry, almost imperceptible smile played among the fine wrinkles of his leathery face.
“And I believe this is Katherine West – our lady lawyer,” he remarked. “I read in the Express how you – ”
Bruce was on her nerves. She could not restrain a sudden flare of temper. “The editor of that paper is a cad!”
“Well, he ain’t exactly what you might call a hand-raised gentleman,” the old lawyer admitted. “At least, I never heard of his exerting himself so hard to be polite that he strained any tendons.”
“You know him, then?”
“A little. He’s my nephew.”
“Oh! I remember.”
“And we live together,” the old man loquaciously drawled on, eying her closely with a smile that might have been either good-natured or satirical. “Batch it – with a nigger who saves us work by stealing things we’d otherwise have to take care of. We scrap most of the time. I make fun of him, and he gets sore. The trouble with the editor of the Express is, he had a doting ma. He should have had an almighty lot of thrashing when a boy, and instead he never tasted beech limb once. He’s suffering from the spared rod.”
Katherine had a shrinking from this old man; an aversion which in her mature years she had had no occasion to examine, but which she had inherited unanalyzed from her childhood, when old Hosie Hollingsworth had been the chief scandal of the town – an infidel, who had dared challenge the creation of the earth in seven days, and yet was not stricken down by a fiery bolt from heaven! She did not pursue the subject of Bruce, but went directly to her business.
“I understand that you have an office to rent.”
“So I have. Like to see it?”
“That is what I called for.”
“Just come along with me.”
He rose, and Katherine followed him to the floor above and into a room furnished much as the one she had just left.
“This office was last used,” commented old Hosie, “by a young fellow who taught school down in Buck Creek Township and got money to study law with. He tried law for a while.” The old man’s thin prehensile lips shifted his cigar to the other side of his mouth. “He’s down in Buck Creek Township teaching school to get money to pay his back office rent.”
“How about the furniture?” asked Katherine.
“That was his. He left it in part payment. You can use it if you want to.”
“But I don’t want those things about” – pointing gingerly to a pair of cuspidors.
“All right. Though I don’t see how you expect to run a law office in Westville without ’em.” He bent over and took them in his hands. “I’ll take ’em along. I need a few more, for my business is picking up.”
“I suppose I can have possession at once.”
“Whenever you please.”
Standing with the cuspidors in his two hands the old lawyer looked her over. He slowly grinned, and a dry cackle came out of his lean throat.
“I was born out there in Buck Creek Township myself,” he said. “Folks all Quakers, same as your ma’s and your Aunt Rachel’s. I was brought up on plowing, husking corn and going to meeting. Never smiled till after I was twenty; wore a halo, size too large, that slipped down and made my ears stick out. My grandfather’s name was Elijah, my father’s Elisha. My father had twelve sons, and beginning with me, Hosea, he named ’em all in order after the minor prophets. Being brought up in a houseful of prophets, naturally a lot of the gift of prophecy sort of got rubbed off on me.”
“Well?” said Katherine impatiently, not seeing the pertinence of this autobiography.
Again he shifted his cigar. “Well, when I prophesy, it’s inspired,” he went on. “And you can take it as the word that came unto Hosea, that a woman lawyer settling in Westville is going to raise the very dickens in this old town!”
CHAPTER VI
THE LADY LAWYER
When old Hosie had withdrawn with his expectorative plunder, Katherine sat down at the desk and gazed thoughtfully out of her window, taking in the tarnished dome of the Court House that rose lustreless above the elm tops and the heavy-boned farmhorses that stood about the iron hitch-racks of the Square, stamping and switching their tails in dozing warfare against the flies.
Once more, she began to go over the case. Having decided to test all possible theories, she for the moment pigeon-holed the idea of a mistake, and began to seek for other explanations. For a space she vacantly watched the workmen tearing down the speakers’ stand. But presently her eyes began to glow, and she sprang up and excitedly paced the little office.
Perhaps her father had unwittingly and innocently become involved in some large system of corruption! Perhaps this case was the first symptom of the existence of some deep-hidden municipal disease!
It seemed possible – very possible. Her two years with the Municipal League had taught her how common were astute dishonest practices. The idea filled her. She began to burn with a feverish hope. But from the first moment she was sufficiently cool-headed to realize that to follow up the idea she required intimate knowledge of Westville political conditions.
Here she felt herself greatly handicapped. Owing to her long residence away from Westville she was practically in ignorance of public affairs – and she faced the further difficulty of having no one to whom she could turn for information. Her father she knew could be of little service; expert though he was in his specialty, he was blind to evil in men. As for Blake, she did not care to ask aid from him so soon after his refusal of assistance. And as for others, she felt that all who could give her information were either hostile to her father or critical of herself.
For days the idea possessed her mind. She kept it to herself, and, her suspicious eyes sweeping in all directions, she studied as best she could to find some evidence or clue to evidence, that would corroborate her conjecture. In her excited hope, she strove, while she thought and worked, to be indifferent to what the town might think about her. But she was well aware that Old Hosie’s prophecy was swift in coming true – that a storm was raging, a storm of her own sex. It should be explained, however, in justice to them, that they forgot the fact, or never really knew it, that she had been forced to take her father’s case. To be sure, there was no open insult, no direct attack, no face-to-face denunciation; but piazzas buzzed indignantly with her name, and at the meeting of the Ladies’ Aid the poor were forgotten, as at the Missionary Society were the unbibled heathen upon the foreign shore.
Fragments of her sisters’ pronouncements were wafted to Katherine’s ears. “No self-respecting, womanly woman would ever think of wanting to be a lawyer” – “A forward, brazen, unwomanly young person” – “A disgrace to the town, a disgrace to our sex” – “Think of the example she sets to impressionable young girls; they’ll want to break away and do all sorts of unwomanly things” – “Everybody knows her reason for being a lawyer is only that it gives her a greater chance to be with the men.”
Katherine heard, her mouth hardened, a certain defiance came into her manner. But she went straight ahead seeking evidence to support her suspicion.
Every day made her feel more keenly her need of intimate knowledge about the city’s political affairs; then, unexpectedly, and from an unexpected quarter, an informant stepped out upon her stage. Several times Old Hosie Hollingsworth had spoken casually when they had chanced to pass in the building or on the street. One day his lean, stooped figure appeared in her office and helped itself to a chair.
“I see you haven’t exactly made what Charlie Horn, in his dramatic criticisms, calls an uproarious and unprecedented success,” he remarked, after a few preliminaries.
“I have not been sufficiently interested to notice,” was her crisp response.
“That’s right; keep your back up,” said he. “I’ve been agin about everything that’s popular, and for everything that’s unpopular, that ever happened in this town. I’ve been an ‘agin-er’ for fifty years. They’d have tarred and feathered me long ago if there’d been any leading citizen unstingy enough to have donated the tar. Then, too, I’ve had a little money, and going through the needle’s eye is easy business compared to losing the respect of Westville so long as you’ve got money – unless, of course,” he added, “you’re a female lawyer. I tell you, there’s no more fun than stirring up the animals in this old town. Any one unpopular in Westville is worth being friends with, and so if you’re willing – ”
He held out his thin, bony hand. Katherine, with no very marked enthusiasm, took it. Then her eyes gleamed with a new light; and obeying an impulse she asked:
“Are you acquainted with political conditions in Westville?”
“Me acquainted with – ” He cackled. “Why, I’ve been setting at my office window looking down on the political circus of this town ever since Noah run aground on Mount Ararat.”
She leaned forward eagerly.
“Then you know how things stand?”
“To a T.”
“Tell me, is there any rotten politics, any graft or corruption going on?” She flushed. “Of course, I mean except what’s charged against my father.”
“When Blind Charlie Peck was in power, there was more graft and dirty – ”
“Not then, but now?” she interrupted.
“Now? Well, of course you know that since Blake run Blind Charlie out of business ten years ago, Blake has been the big gun in this town.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Then you must know that in the last ten years Westville has been text, sermon, and doxology for all the reformers in the state.”
“But could not corruption be going on without Mr. Blake knowing it? Could not Mr. Peck be secretly carrying out some scheme?”
“Blind Charlie? Blind Charlie ain’t dead yet, not by a long sight – and as long as there’s a breath in his carcass, that good-natured old blackguard is likely to be a dangerous customer. But though Charlie’s still the boss of his party, he controls no offices, and has got no real power. He’s as helpless as Satan was after he’d been kicked out of heaven and before he’d landed that big job he holds on the floor below. Nowadays, Charlie just sits in his side office over at the Tippecanoe House playing seven-up from breakfast till bedtime.”
“Then you think there’s no corrupt politics in Westville?” she asked in a sinking voice.
“Not an ounce of ’em!” said Old Hosie with decision.
This agreed with the conviction that had been growing upon Katherine during the last few days. While she had entertained suspicion of there being corruption, she had several times considered the advisability of putting a detective on the case. But this idea she now abandoned.
After this talk with the old lawyer, Katherine was forced back again upon misunderstanding. She went carefully over the records of her father’s department, on file in the Court House, seeking some item that would cast light upon the puzzle. She went over and over the indictment, seeking some loose end, some overlooked inconsistency, that would yield her at least a clue.
For days she kept doggedly at this work, steeling herself against the disapprobation of the town. But she found nothing. Then, in a flash, an overlooked point recurred to her. The trouble, so went her theory, was all due to a confusion of the bribe with the donation to the hospital. Where was that donation?
Here was a matter that might at last lead to a solution of the difficulty. Again on fire with hope, she interviewed her father. He was certain that a donation had been promised, he had thought the envelope handed him by Mr. Marcy contained the gift – but of the donation itself he knew no more. She interviewed Doctor Sherman; he had heard Mr. Marcy refer to a donation but knew nothing about the matter. She tried to get in communication with Mr. Marcy, only to learn that he was in England studying some new filtering plants recently installed in that country. Undiscouraged, she one day stepped off the train in St. Louis, the home of the Acme Filter, and appeared in the office of the company.
The general manager, a gentleman who ran to portliness in his figure, his jewellery and his courtesy, seemed perfectly acquainted with the case. In exculpation of himself and his company, he said that they were constantly being held up by every variety of official from a county commissioner to a mayor, and they were simply forced to give “presents” in order to do business.
“But my father’s defense,” put in Katherine, “was that he thought this ‘present’ was in reality a donation to the hospital. Was anything said to my father about a donation?”
“I believe there was.”
“That corroborates my father!” Katherine exclaimed eagerly. “Would you make that statement at the trial – or at least give me an affidavit to that effect?”
“I’ll be glad to give you an affidavit. But I should explain that the ‘present’ and the donation were two distinctly separate affairs.”
“Then what became of the donation?” Katherine cried triumphantly.
“It was sent,” said the manager.
“Sent?”
“I sent it myself,” was the reply.
Katherine left St. Louis more puzzled than before. What had become of the check, if it had really been sent? Home again, she ransacked her father’s desk with his aid, and in a bottom drawer they found a heap of long-neglected mail.
Doctor West at first scratched his head in perplexity. “I remember now,” he said. “I never was much of a hand to keep up with my letters, and for the few days before that celebration I was so excited that I just threw everything – ”
But Katherine had torn open an envelope and was holding in her hands a fifty dollar check from the Acme Filter Company.
“What was the date of your arrest?” she asked sharply. “The date Mr. Marcy gave you that money?”
“The fifteenth of May.”
“This check is dated the twelfth of May. The envelope shows it was received in Westville on the thirteenth.”
“Well, what of that?”
“Only this,” said Katherine slowly, and with a chill at her heart, “that the prosecution can charge, and we cannot disprove the charge, that the real donation was already in your possession at the time you accepted what you say you believed was the donation.”
Then, with a rush, a great temptation assailed Katherine – to destroy this piece of evidence unfavourable to her father which she held in her hands. For several moments the struggle continued fiercely. But she had made a vow with herself when she had entered law that she was going to keep free from the trickery and dishonourable practices so common in her profession. She was going to be an honest lawyer, or be no lawyer at all. And so, at length, she laid the check before her father.
“Just indorse it, and we’ll send it in to the hospital,” she said.
Afterward it occurred to her that to have destroyed the check would at the best have helped but little, for the prosecution, if it so desired, could introduce witnesses to prove that the donation had been sent. Suspicion of having destroyed or suppressed the check would then inevitably have rested upon her father.
This discovery of the check was a heavy blow, but Katherine went doggedly back to the first beginnings; and as the weeks crept slowly by she continued without remission her desperate search for a clue which, followed up, would make clear to every one that the whole affair was merely a mistake. But the only development of the summer which bore at all upon the case – and that bearing seemed to Katherine indirect – was that, since early June, the service of the water-works had steadily been deteriorating. There was frequently a shortage in the supply, and the filtering plant, the direct cause of Doctor West’s disgrace, had proved so complete a failure that its use had been discontinued. The water was often murky and unpleasant to the taste. Moreover, all kinds of other faults began to develop in the plant. The city complained loudly of the quality of the water and the failure of the system. It was like one of these new-fangled toys, averred the street corners, that runs like a miracle while the paint is on it and then with a whiz and a whir goes all to thunder.
But to this mere by-product of the case Katherine gave little thought. She had to keep desperately upon the case itself. At times, feeling herself so alone, making no inch of headway, her spirits sank very low indeed. What made the case so wearing on the soul was that she was groping in the dark. She was fighting an invisible enemy, even though it was no more than a misunderstanding – an enemy whom, strive as she would, she could not clutch, with whom she could not grapple. Again and again she prayed for a foe in the open. Had there been a fight, no matter how bitter, her part would have been far, far easier – for in fight there is action and excitement and the lifting hope of victory.
It took courage to work as she did, weary week upon weary week, and discover nothing. It took courage not to slink away at the town’s disapprobation. At times, in the bitterness of her heart, she wished she were out of it all, and could just rest, and be friends with every one. In such moods it would creep coldly in upon her that there could be but one solution to the case – that after all her father must be guilty. But when she would go home and look into his thoughtful, unworldy old face, that solution would instantly become impossible; and she would cast out doubt and despair and renew her determination.
The weeks dragged heavily on – hot and dusty after the first of July, and so dry that out in the country the caked earth was a fine network of zigzagging fissures, and the farmers, gazing despondently upon their shrivelling corn, watched with vain hope for a rescuing cloud to darken the clear, hard, brilliant heavens. At length the summer burned to its close; the opening day of the September term of court was close at hand. But still the case stood just as on the day Katherine had stepped so joyously from the Limited. The evidence of Sherman was unshaken. The charges of Bruce had no answer.
One afternoon – her father’s case was set for two days later – as Katherine left her office, desperate, not knowing which way to turn, her nerves worn fine and thin by the long strain, she saw her father’s name on the front page of the Express. She bought a copy. In the centre of the first page, in a “box” and set in heavy-faced type, was an editorial in Bruce’s most rousing style, trying her father in advance, declaring him flagrantly guilty, and demanding for him the law’s extremest penalty.
That editorial unloosed her long-collected wrath – wrath that had many a reason. In Bruce’s person Katherine had from the first seen the summing up, the leader, of the bitterness against her father. All summer he had continued his sharp attacks, and the virulence of these had helped keep the town wrought up against Doctor West. Moreover, Katherine despised Bruce as a powerful, ruthless, demagogic hypocrite. And to her hostility against him in her father’s behalf and to her contempt for his quack radicalism, was added the bitter implacability of the woman who feels herself scorned. The town’s attitude toward her she resented. But Bruce she hated, and him she prayed with all her soul that she might humble.
She crushed the Express, flung it from her into the gutter, and walked home all a-tremble. Her aunt met her in the hall as she was laying off her hat. A spot burned faintly in either withered cheek of the old woman.
“Who does thee think is here?” she asked.
“Who?” Katherine repeated mechanically, her wrath too high for interest in anything else.
“Mr. Bruce. Upstairs with thy father.”
“What!” cried Katherine.
Her hat missed the hook and fell to the floor, and she went springing up the stairway. The next instant she flung open her father’s door, and walked straight up to Bruce, before whom she paused, bosom heaving, eyes on fire.
“What are you doing here?” she demanded.
His powerful figure rose, and his square-hewn face looked directly into her own.
“Interviewing your father,” he returned with his aggressive calm.
“He was asking me to confess,” explained Doctor West.
“Confess?” cried Katherine.
“Just so,” replied Bruce. “His guilt is undoubted, so he might as well confess.”
Scorn flamed at him.
“I see! You are trying to get a confession out of him, in advance of the trial, as a big feature for your terrible paper!”
She moved a pace nearer him. All the suppressed anger, all the hidden anguish, of the last three months burst up volcanically.
“Oh! oh!” she cried breathlessly. “I never dreamt till I met you that a man could be so low, so heartless, as to hound an old man as you have hounded my father – and all for the sake of a yellow newspaper sensation. But he’s a safe man for you to attack. Yes, he’s safe – old, unpopular, helpless!”
Bruce’s heavy brows lowered. He did not give back a step before her ireful figure.
“And because he’s old and unpopular I should not attack him, eh?” he demanded. “Because he’s down, I should not hit him? That’s your woman’s reasoning, is it? Well, let me tell you,” and his gray eyes flashed, and his voice had a crunching tone – “that I believe when you’ve got an enemy of society down, don’t, because you pity him, let him up to go and do the same thing again. While you’ve got him down, keep on hitting him till you’ve got him finished!”
“Like the brute that you are!” she cried. “But, like the coward you are, you first very carefully choose your ‘enemy of society.’ You were careful to choose one who could not hit back!”
“I did not choose your father. He thrust himself upon the town’s attention. And I consider neither his weakness nor his strength. I consider only the fact that your father has done the city a greater injury than any man who ever lived in Westville.”
“It’s a lie! I tell you it’s a lie!”
“It’s the truth!” he declared harshly, dominantly. “His swindling Westville by giving us a worthless filtering-plant in return for a bribe – why, that is the smallest evil he has done the town. Before that time, Westville was on the verge of making great municipal advances – on the verge of becoming a model and a leader for the small cities of the Middle West. And now all that grand development is ruined – and ruined by that man, your father!” He excitedly jerked a paper from his pocket and held it out to her. “If you want to see what he has brought us to, read that editorial in the Clarion!”
She fixed him with glittering eyes.
“I have read one cowardly editorial to-day in a Westville paper. That is enough.”
“Read that, I say!” he commanded.
For answer she took the Clarion and tossed it into the waste-basket. She glared at him, quivering all over, in her hands a convulsive itch for physical vengeance.
“If I thought that in all your fine talk about the city there was one single word of sincerity, I might respect you,” she said with slow and scathing contempt. “But your words are the words of a mere poseur – of a man who twists the truth to fit his desires – of a man who deals in the ideas that seem to him most profitable – of a man who cares not how poor, how innocent, is the body he uses as a stepping stone for his clambering greed and ambition. Oh, I know you – I have watched you – I have read you. You are a mere self-seeker! You are a demagogue! You are a liar! And, on top of that, you are a coward!”
Whatever Arnold Bruce was, he was a man with a temper. Fury was blazing behind his heavy spectacles.
“Go on! I care that for the words of a woman who has so little taste, so little sense, so little modesty, as to leave the sphere – ”
“You boor!” gasped Katharine.
“Perhaps I am. At least I am not afraid to speak the truth straight out even to a woman. You are all wrong. You are unwomanly. You are unsexed. Your pretensions as a lawyer are utterly preposterous, as the trial on Thursday will show you. And the condemnation of the town is not half as severe a rebuke – ”
“Stop!” gasped Katherine. A wild defiance surged up and overmastered her, her nerves broke, and her hot words tumbled out hysterically. “You think you are a God-anointed critic of humanity, but you are only a heartless, conceited cad! Just wait – I’ll show you what your judgment of me is worth! I am going to clear my father! I am going to make this Westville that condemns me kneel at my feet! and as for you – you can think what you please! But don’t you ever dare to speak to my father again – don’t you ever dare speak to me again – don’t you ever dare enter this house again! Now go! Go! I say. Go! Go! Go!”
His face had grown purple; he seemed to be choking. For a space he gazed at her. Then without answering he bowed slightly and was gone.
She glared a moment at the door. Then suddenly she collapsed upon the floor, her head and arms on the old haircloth sofa, and her whole body shook with silent sobs. Doctor West, first gazing at her a little helplessly, sat down upon the sofa, and softly stroked her hair. For a time there were no words – only her convulsive breathing, her choking sobs.
Presently he said gently:
“I’m sure you’ll do everything you said.”
“No – that’s the trouble,” she moaned. “What I said – was – was just a big bluff. I won’t do any – of those things. Your trial is two days off – and, father, I haven’t one bit of evidence – I don’t know what we’re going to do – and the jury will have to – oh, father, father, that man was right; I’m just – just a great big failure!”
Again she shook with sobs. The old man continued to sit beside her, softly stroking her thick brown hair.