From the Life/District-Attorney Wickson
FROM THE LIFE
DISTRICT-ATTORNEY WICKSON
WICKSON, Arthur John, lawyer; Mar. 19, 1867-Aug. 25, 1912; see Vol. VII (1912-13).—Who's Who.
To tell the truth, I did not at any time know District-Attorney Wickson well enough to be able now to do an intimate portrait-study of him at first hand. But I know his town—having "muckraked" it while he was in office. I know many of the circumstances of his story, because they were part of the material that came up in the raking. And I know a number of his closest friends and associates, from whom I have gathered the incidents of that day in his life which I wish to record—the great and culminating day of his career.
The men whom I have relied upon for the details of that day are "Jack" Arnett, sculptor of the Wickson Memorial, McPhee Harris, president of the Purity Defense League and the local Anti-Saloon Association, and Tim Collins (or "Cole" or "Colburn"), the detective who helped Wickson in the investigations and prosecutions that made the District Attorney a national figure. These three men were the chief actors in the dramatic crisis of Wickson's life and in those crucial incidents which seem to me to express him most completely. Furthermore, McPhee Harris had been associated with him for years, and Jack Arnett was a boyhood friend who knew him better, probably, than any one except his mother.
I have met his mother, but I have never had sufficient reportorial ruthlessness to ask her about him.
2
Arnett has given me one anecdote of Wickson's early days that I should consider vital to an understanding of him. "Wickson," he says, "left home as a boy, and came to town because he had been beaten by his father." The father he described as a petty tyrant who ruled his poverty-stricken family and his starved farm with all the exacting imperiousness of incompetency aggravated by indigestion. Arthur Wickson was an only child. He went one morning to his mother in the kitchen and blurted out to her that he had to leave home, that he couldn't stand it any longer. "I remember," he told Arnett, "how she was washing dishes, and when I told her she didn't say anything. She didn't even look at me. She was working in front of a window, and she just raised her eyes from the dish-pan and stood looking out of that window as if there were bars across it. I had the feeling that a convict must have when he tells his cellmate he has a chance to escape and can't take him along.
"She asked me what I was going to do, and I told her I was going to be a lawyer. I don't know where I got that ambition. She dried her hands on her apron without a word, and went up-stairs to her room, and when she came down she had two dollars that she'd saved—I don't know how. God! When I think of those hands and those two dollars!
"I didn't want to take them. She made me. I promised her I'd pay them back, and I've been trying to ever since, but I couldn't do it with a million.
"Funny thing. She kissed me sort of timidly, and there was a look in her eyes as if I had some resemblance to him that frightened her. You know what I mean. It made me hate him so that when I walked off down the road and he shouted at me from the field I didn't even answer him. He was plowing. It was chilly, and the steam was rising from the horses as they stood there at the end of a furrow. I remember yet that he and the horses looked small—like little figures in lead—and I felt that he was a stranger that I didn't know who he was. Can you explain that?"
3
I consider that incident illuminating because it really explains why Wickson became a reformer. Undoubtedly he transferred to the governing power of society the feeling that he had against his father, the governing power of his youth. He did it, of course, unconsciously, sympathizing with the victims of social injustice as he had sympathized with his mother and himself. And that, I believe, is the reason why he "never thought" of his father again.
Moreover, it was probably his early revolt against paternal injustice that inspired him with the ambition to be a lawyer so that he might be able to defend himself and others against wrongs, and help to administer justice equitably.
I advance the theory because I have found a similar transference in many other reformers.
4
In any case he arrived in the city that afternoon in the rain and set about finding work. It was about four o'clock, according to all accounts, when he came into the office of McPhee Harris and asked if they needed an office-boy. No one pretends to know what attracted him to that particular door, but I venture to suggest that it was because of the word "Defense" in the sign, "Purity Defense League." Harris was then counsel for the League. He remembers being instantly struck by the boy's air of self-reliance. "He was dripping wet," Harris says, "his hair was in his eyes, and his clothes were pathetic. But he stood up there and confronted me like a young David. He had wonderful eyes—always. I couldn't have turned him away."
Harris employed him, and, finding that he had no place to sleep, Harris sent him with a note to the Y. M. C. A. building, where they put him in a room with another of Harris's protégés. And this second protégé was Jack Arnett, the sculptor of the Wickson Memorial, then a young waif who had come into the hands of the Purity Defense League because he had been hanging around barrooms, making a living by drawing caricatures of celebrities in the sawdust on barroom floors. Harris was supporting him and paying his tuition in the local art-school.
"I remember," Arnett says, "that before Wickson went to bed that night he sat down and wrote a letter to his mother and sent her back one of her own dollars on account."
5
Wickson proved to have a brain as hardy as his body. He worked and studied methodically, thoroughly, and without the effort of a frown. He became chief clerk of McPhee Harris's office by virtue of a mechanical efficiency that was the first expression of his basic integrity of mind. On that efficiency Harris came more and more to rely. Wickson shared in Harris's prosecutions of the venders of "picture post-cards," the proprietors of "nickelodeons," and the managers of "variety shows" who offended against the League's standards of public purity. Arnett, having an artist's views of nudity, often quarreled with Wickson about these prosecutions.
"He wasn't morbid, as McPhee Harris was," Arnett says. "He did it to protect young people from contamination. Harris did it because he was rotten himself—that's my idea, anyway—and his inward struggle with himself made him a crazy fanatic. He could see something nasty in any—in any naked innocence."
As McPhee Harris's junior partner, Wickson himself conducted some of the Purity Defense League's later cases against saloon-keepers and the owners of "dives." And when Harris became president of the local "Drys" Wickson succeeded him as attorney for the League, and so came to prosecute the "white-slave" cases that first made him notorious. His election to the office of District Attorney followed unexpectedly. He was carried into power on a reform wave that was blown up by a violent agitation against the "red-light district."
It was as District Attorney that his real career began—and his real difficulties. Both culminated together on the day whose incidents I wish to give. McPhee Harris has his own account of those incidents. Jack Arnett has another. And I have coaxed a third out of the detective, Tim Collins. Putting the three together, it is easy to reconstruct a dramatic story of the day.
6
It began in an interview with McPhee Harris, who came smiling into the District Attorney's office soon after Wickson arrived there for his morning's work. "Just a moment, Arthur," he apologized for taking Wickson's time, and Wickson shook hands with him without replying.
McPhee Harris has a smile that at its most perfunctory moments is something more than polite. It is the smile of austerity made benevolent by the conscientious sympathy of a professing Christian. His chin, clean-shaven between gray side-whiskers, repeats the bony conformation of his narrow skull, which is bald between two bushes of gray hair. He is one of the few men left in America who still wear on all occasions the tall silk hat.
He said to Wickson, "I had a visit last night from friend Toole." And Toole being a corrupt machine politician, the "friend" was said sarcastically, of course.
Wickson leaned forward on his table-desk intently.
"We have put the fear of God into them," Harris assured him. "They are prepared to nominate a ticket of good men."
Wickson waited, watching him, silent. (Harris remembers that silence well—as a justification.)
"We are to name them," he went on, "practically all. They reserve a few of the minor offices—as, for instance, the sheriff and the county clerk and recorder."
"If they nominate those three officers," Wickson said, in his high, unpleasant voice, "they'll have control of the local machinery of elections."
"Perhaps so," Harris conceded, amiably. "It's difficult to get everything at once. They'll accept our nominee for the Supreme Court."
"Because they control the rest of the bench," said Wickson.
"Still," Harris pointed out, "we must begin somewhere—and one is a beginning. We're also to have the coroner, two of the county commissioners, some of the members of the Legislature, some Senators, and some of the state officers. The details aren't decided. It's for us to decide—largely. They're very conciliatory."
Wickson asked, at last, "And who nominates the district attorney?"
Harris replied, "We do."
But he replied with a look that was somewhat too steady—with a look that was rather self-consciously defiant.
The District Attorney had come to know McPhee Harris as "a man of indecisive character and small mind, strengthened and enlarged by the sense of a divine power relying on him as its instrument." There was in Harris's eyes, now, the glint of that resolute instrumentality. Wickson's scrutiny probed and questioned him.
"They don't think," Harris admitted, "that we can re-elect you. They believe you've made too many enemies."
That was "the nigger in the woodpile," as Wickson would have said. And having uncovered it, he nodded and rose.
He began to walk thoughtfully up and down his office, ignoring McPhee Harris, as if, having discovered "what was up," he had turned to concentrate on that instead of the familiar face behind which the secret had been concealed.
7
Wickson had been carried into office, as I have said, by an agitation against the red-light district. And as long as he had devoted his office to a crusade against vice he had been backed by the Purity League, by McPhee Harris, by the Federation of Women's Clubs, by the church-goers and all the good people of the town. But he had found vice protected by both the political organizations, and when he attacked them he found them protected by the rich men of the community who owned the public-utility monopolies that had been voted to them by the politicians. He had made enemies not only in the dive district, but among the best citizens "on the Hill." He had been accused of "attacking vested interests" and of "stirring up class hatreds." He had offended some of the most generous contributors to the funds of the Purity Defense League. He had offended McPhee Harris.
Hence the silence with which he had listened to Harris and the suspicion with which he had scrutinized him. Hence, also, Harris's righteously defiant look and the complacency of his announcement, "They don't think that we can re-elect you." He was the meek bearer of the bowstring.
The condemned man took a few turns up and down the room, paused before a window, turned suddenly, and said: "When you look out that window and see the upper town—up there on the Hill—you see it as the abode of decency and virtue and everything that's godly. And you see it warred on by the vice of the lower town—where everything is sin. Don't you?"
Harris did not answer. He laid aside his hat on the table and crossed his arms, settling himself to hear an argument and reply to it as soon as he had heard it all.
"When I look out that window," the District Attorney continued, "I see the upper town as the abode chiefly of the men who keep the lower wards living in the dirt and the evil conditions that breed sin. I see the lower town working in conditions of pollution to pay the money that makes the Hill rich—decent—respectable. That's the difference between us. And there doesn't seem to be any way of reconciling it."
His office was on the sixth floor of the Settle Building. He could look down on the roofs of half the city in the morning sunlight. "It isn't vice that I want to fight any more," he said. "It's the conditions that make vice."
"And yet," Harris retorted, "you admit, I suppose, that there may be such a thing as 'honest poverty'?"
Wickson wheeled on him. "I'll go farther. I'll admit that there may be such a thing as honest wealth."
Harris spread his hands. "I don't wish to think," he said, "that you've lost your faith in the spiritualities. I don't wish to believe that you've become wholly a materialist. God has manifested Himself in your work." And Harris could say these things without any trace of cant, in a voice full of conviction. "You've been a great power for good, but in struggling against the evils of this world I think you're forgetting to rely on the saving grace that can alone work the miracle of regeneration in the soul of evil."
"I know." Wickson sighed. "I know. You're sincere. You believe it. There's no use in arguing."
"There is nothing to argue," Harris said, pontifically. "It is so."
Wickson ran his hand through his hair—a rough shock of hair that had grown sparse in a dry tangle. He sat down again at his desk. "Well," he said, "they don't think I can be re-elected, eh? They tell you 'the boys' won't vote for me—the rank and file. I've made too many enemies. Some of our own friends don't like my remarks about the connection between street-railway franchises and protected vice. Bill Toole—and it comes, I suppose, from old Bradford himself—Bill Toole offers to compromise on a good ticket if I'm dropped."
"No!" Harris cried. "No! That's not true."
"Not in so many words. Of course not! But if you insisted on having me on the ticket it would come to that. Isn't that so? Isn't it?"
"I don't believe you could possibly be re-elected."
"We didn't believe, in the first place, that I could be elected. Yet we made the fight."
"There's no necessity of running any such risk. We're to have the nomination for the office. We'll pick a good man."
Wickson took up some papers on his desk. "If it were only a question of the office," he said, "I'd be glad to get out. But there's more than that. There's— However, it's useless for us to talk. You'll have to excuse me. I'm busy." He unfolded a sheet of typewriting and pushed the button for his stenographer.
As McPhee Harris reached for his silk hat he looked down on ingratitude coldly. "I expected as much," he said. "Good morning."
Wickson did not reply. He allowed Harris to go out of his life as he had passed his father in the field, plowing.
His stenographer answered the bell, and without raising his eyes he muttered, "Get me Collins on the 'phone."
The clerk replied, "He's been waiting here to see you."
Wickson tossed aside the sheet eagerly. "Send him in."
8
There was nothing personal in the furnishings of Wickson's room—an official desk-table, some bare chairs, some framed photographs of men and buildings on the walls, and beyond that not even a bookcase. There was nothing characteristic about his "ready-made" clothes that hung on him as if their one purpose was to impede his impatient movements. And in his interview with McPhee Harris he had been impersonal, withdrawn, and as colorless as his surroundings.
But now, to receive the detective, there came a relaxing in the muscles of his mouth and a meditative widening of the eyes. He pushed his papers back from him. He began to beat a tattoo on his desk blotter, looking aside out of the window and allowing his mind to rove with his eyes. It was evident that the detective gave him a sense of security.
Collins entered, hat in hand, closed the door behind him, and crossed to a chair with a peculiar noiseless placidity. He was plump, clean-shaven, commonplace, with mild and rather vacant brown eyes, broad-shouldered, short, and slow. He might have been the proprietor of a commercial travelers' hotel. He did not look genial enough to be a saloon-keeper, yet he had the sort of figure that you would associate with barroom tables or the chairs of hotel lobbies. He had the bronze button of a fraternal order on his lapel and a masonic trinket on his watch-chain. There was nothing whatever about him to suggest the detective of popular tradition.
Yet he had been brought from Washington by the Purity League with enough scalps on his official belt to give him a reputation in those circles where fame can have no notoriety. He was rated by Wickson as "the only real detective I ever knew." And he had performed miracles for the District Attorney.
He turned his chair to face the door and sat down squarely with his hands spread on his knees. He said: "They tell me Madge was down at Headquarters the day before yesterday. She's keeping Cooney. He's out again. They're using her to frame it up with him to bump you off."
That is to say, he told Wickson that at Police Headquarters they were arranging to have the District Attorney murdered by an ex-policeman named Cooney whom Wickson had prosecuted and sent to prison.
Wickson raised one eyebrow at him, smiling wryly. "Tim," he said, "McPhee Harris has slumped on me."
Collins repeated: "They're going to try to bump you off. They've got Cooney worked up to it. They're keeping him just drunk enough to do it. He's going to shoot you. That's what he's hanging around the court-house for."
In the earlier days of their work together Wickson might have asked, "Are you sure?" or "How do you know?'* But he had long since learned that Collins never spoke till he was sure and that the means by which he made sure were not open to inspection. He kept his sources of information secret from Wickson, even.
"When you challenged that juror yesterday," Collins said, "you noticed how pale Sotjie got? Well, he didn't turn pale because he lost the man. He turned pale because Cooney had come in behind you. He was afraid that Cooney was going to shoot. That's what gave me the tip—the way Sotjie's hands shook. I've given orders to our boys to keep Cooney outside the rail after this. Plummer will trail along with you."
The Sotjie of whom he spoke was the chief of police. He was under indictment on charges of corruption in office; Wickson was prosecuting him; his trial had begun; and the detective had discovered that, in order to escape prosecution by Wickson, the chief of police was conspiring with the ex-policeman, Cooney, to have Wickson shot.
Wickson considered for a moment the incredibility of such a plot. "The strangest part about it is," he said, "that these fellows are able to do these things just because no decent citizen would believe it possible. It's a funny situation. You can't go out and cry 'Help!' because, if you did, everybody would think you'd gone mad." He snorted a dry laugh. "Well, I don't see what I can do. He could come up behind me on the street at any time."
"No. I think not," Collins held.
"Why not?"
"It never happens that way. They always seem to wait for you somewhere that they know you'll come—and work themselves up to it."
Wickson tipped back in his swivel-chair and clasped his hands behind his head. "I'm done, anyway, Tim," he said. "Our own people have gone back on me. They don't believe they can re-elect me. And I can't win without their support. ... I don't seem to be able to make them understand what the game is in this town. I can't make them believe it—any more than we could make them believe that Sotjie was putting up Cooney to shoot me." He swung a fist down on the table. "My God! If we could only make them see these things."
Collins shook his head with slow finality.
"We can't, of course," Wickson agreed. "We can't reach them. We can't make them believe it. I wouldn't have believed it myself when I first came in here—hardly. And sometimes I wake up at night, now, and wonder if I haven't been dreaming it."
Collins nodded solemnly, looking at his feet.
Wickson began to pace up and down the room again. "Besides," he asked, with an air of relieving his mind of something that had long been burdening it, "what's the use of prosecuting this man Sotjie? He's not to blame. The town has to have a crooked chief of police, and they'll always get some one who'll do what Sotjie did. And if we could reach old Bradford and the 'higher-ups' what would be the use of prosecuting them? As long as these public utilities are lying around loose, waiting for some one to steal them, they'll be stolen. It's a whole community that's been to blame. You can't prosecute a whole community. And prosecuting a man like Sotjie is like prosecuting a man for having typhoid fever—when he got it drinking from a city tap!"
Collins looked worried.
"Of course, I have to prosecute. Just as you have to get evidence. That's what I'm paid for. That's what I'm here for. And if they shoot me for it Bradford and the rest will be the first to sign a testimonial to my good character—so that they sha'n't be suspected of any lack of public spirit." He laughed rather despairingly. "It's funny, isn't it?" He sat down. "God! I'm tired of it!" he said.
The "Bradford" to whom he referred was the great William D. Bradford, the financial "boss" of the town, owner of the street railway, the gas company, the most successful newspaper, one of the banks, and two of the trust companies.
Collins mused behind a mask of mild vacuity. He had not been so much listening to Wickson's argument as considering the state of mind that spoke in the words. He indicated his conclusion when he replied, "I'll put Plummer on your door."
If he had spoken out that conclusion he would have said, "You probably don't much care whether you get shot or not, just at present, but it's my business to see that you're protected."
Wickson did not understand—and did not try to. "Tim," he asked, "what do you think about things—the way they are in this town? What the devil can we do?"
The detective rubbed his palms on his thick knees. "I guess," he said, "the trouble with me is I don't get time to think—about things—taking them in the large. I'm too busy trying to dope out what the other fellows are thinking."
"Well, then, what do you suppose they're thinking now?"
"They're thinking they've got to stop you from trying this case against Sotjie—if they can. If you go ahead you'll mark them with the evidence you've got so that they'll never be able to touch you for fear of making the town too hot to hold them. And if you go ahead they'll maybe lose the election. If they're going to stop you they've got to stop you now. I don't think they want to kill you, but they want you in the hospital till after elections. That's dead sure. You've got to be careful."
It was Collins's opinion that the District Attorney somewhat lacked the instinct of self-preservation. He admitted that Wickson could not have done his peculiar work for the community if he had had that instinct very highly developed. And consequently he accepted as natural Wickson's lack of attention to the warning that he must be "careful."
Wickson had glanced at his desk calendar, at the mention of elections—as if to figure out how many weeks remained had turned the yesterday's leaf to arrive at the day's date, and had found a note in his own handwriting. He reached at once to his desk-telephone. "Send Arnett in," he directed, "as soon as he comes. Yes." ...
"He's leaving for New York this afternoon," he explained to the detective. "I promised him a letter." He began to scratch squares and crosses on his blotter with a dry pen. "Do you think Bradford or any of the big ones know about Cooney?"
"Not if they can keep from knowing it. That's the sort of thing they make it their business not to know."
"Come in!" Wickson called to a knock at the door. And, "Hello, Jack!" he greeted the sculptor. "I nearly forgot about you. What time does your train go?"
"It doesn't go," Arnett said, taking the outstretched hand. "I'm staying to do a portrait bust of old Bradford."
"Bradford!"
"On an order that Harris got me."
"Bradford!" Wickson turned to enjoy the joke with Collins, but the detective had already gone—inconspicuously—and the door had closed behind him.
9
Arnett sat down at once, on his shoulder-blades, in the loose-jointed attitude of a tall man whose work kept him on his feet. He felt in his pocket for his inevitable pipe and hooked it into the corner of his mouth. "I sold him my 'Nymph,' too," he said.
He was as unconsciously individual in his appearance as the detective had been consciously indeterminate—a lank, black-haired, strong-handed man in clothes that showed the dust and plaster of his sculptor studio in spite of brushing. His eyes were wrinkled from a puckered scrutiny; he watched Wickson (and took no note of his background) with a professional interest in the human spirit as it expressed itself in the flesh. He had not seen Wickson for months. Their careers had separated them.
"A bust of Bradford!" Wickson laughed. "That's great! Do you ever do tombstones?"
Arnett sucked his cold pipe humorously. "Are you going to bury some one?"
"No. They're going to bury me."
"What for?"
"For trying to can Sotjie. They have a man out to shoot me."
Arnett took his pipe from his teeth as if to put aside his jocular air with it. "What's up? Do you mean it?"
Wickson nodded, smiling.
"Who's doing it?"
"Well—Sotjie, first of all. And then—the men who have helped to make Sotjie what he is, including Bradford. And then—all of us who have allowed conditions to become what they are in this town. You, for instance. You never vote, do you?"
"Murder? You mean murder?"
"No. The man 'll be drunk. It's a fellow I sent up three years ago, and he has that grievance. It 'll only be manslaughter."
Arnett stared at him. "Are you growing fanciful?"
"You'd think so, wouldn't you?"
"Oh, pshaw, Wick! I don't believe it."
Wickson laughed. "I knew you wouldn't. That's why I told you." He began to gather up the papers from his desk. "The devil of it is I don't want to prosecute Sotjie—I don't feel that he's been to blame—but conditions make it necessary. And I don't suppose he wants to shoot me—if he could avoid it. It's a gay life. Will you walk over to the court with me?"
Arnett rose silently, dropped his pipe into his pocket, and looked a long time at the lining of his hat before he put it on. "Why don't you have him arrested?"
Wickson patted him on the shoulder and turned him to the door. "We can't do that until he shoots me."
"If you know he's going to shoot you, you can prove it."
"You think so?" He turned the knob. "There are a good many things in this business that a man knows and can't prove."
With the opening of the door the activities of the outer office interrupted them and silenced Arnett. He followed or waited for Wickson as the District Attorney excused himself to a visitor, gave instructions to an assistant, bent to hear a hurried report in confidence, or stopped to "jolly" a newspaper man. When they reached the elevator Collins's young detective, Plummer, was with them. He stood aside, at the ground floor, and followed them out to the street, carefully unalert, with the comprehensive glances of an apparently idle eye.
"But I don't get this thing at all," Arnett complained, as they turned up the street.
Wickson took his elbow. "I'm in the position of a policeman in a thieves' quarter—where the political boss of the quarter protects them—in return for their help in elections. See? Only in this case the whole town is the quarter, and Bradford is the political boss, and he hasn't been able to keep me from bothering the thieves, and so the thieves are going to 'get' me."
"Oh, come off," Arnett broke in. "Bradford isn't that bad."
"Surely not. I'm putting it very crudely, of course. I'm willing to believe that Bradford doesn't see it that way at all. He probably feels himself as much the victim of conditions as I do. He'll tell you that the thieves run the town—that he has to operate the street railway—and that he couldn't operate it unless he stood in with them. See? He'll tell you that the fault is with the citizens who won't be bothered with politics—who leave the thieves to take that trouble. But you'll notice that when I try to rouse those citizens to make them take an interest, I get notice from Bradford, through Bill Toole to McPhee Harris, that I can't be renominated."
The street was busy with trolley-cars, wagons, hurrying people, and the displays and activities of trade—the business of a life from which Arnett's mind was as much withdrawn as any artist's. Usually he walked through it unseeingly, hurrying to escape it. He looked at it now as the public life in which Wickson played a leading part, and blinked at it, feeling himself asked for advice about it, and bewildered to find that he could not see below its shifting surface. He shook his head.
"I don't know. I don't know what to make of it," he complained.
"If it were only the case of the policeman and the thieves," Wickson said, at the court-house steps, "it might be a good thing to let them shoot. If it would attract attention to the conditions— But I don't want them simply to 'mangle' me."
Arnett caught him by the sleeve, alarmed by the very matter-of-factness of his tone. "My God! Wick! You're not going to do anything so foolish?"
Wickson smiled slowly at him in a sort of amused appraisal of his horror. "It isn't what I'm going to do that counts. It's up to them. I have to go ahead with my job. However, I don't believe they'll dare. ... You run along now and get to work on your bust. Come in and tell me how it goes, will you? I hope you're not going to do the old boy in the nude, like your 'Nymph.'"
Arnett laughed, nervously relieved by the jocularity. "I believe Harris got me the order so I'd have something to do with clothes on. He thinks I do the other because it sells—such being the depravity of the artistic rich!"
"Well, good-by," Wickson said. "Be good."
"And you be careful."
Wickson waved his hand and turned up the steps. Arnett brushed against the nonchalant Plummer as he hurried off.
And half-way down the block the sculptor remembered that he had seen this same man in the elevator—that he had seen him pass into the court-house, look around the corridor and come out. And now he was following Wickson into the court-house again!
He hastened back with a frightened suspicion that in Plununer he had seen the assassin.
10
He lost himself at once in the corridors of the ground floor of the court-house, where the doors were marked, "County Commissioners," "Local Imp.," "Sheriff," on the yellowed frosting of their glasses; and when he demanded breathlessly of a passing clerk, "Where 'll I find the District Attorney—Wickson?" the official replied, curtly, "Settle Building," and went on about his business.
It was from the Settle Building that Arnett and Wickson had just walked to the court-house.
He blundered upon the elevator shaft and had to wait endlessly for the cage to descend to him. The elevator man replied to his confused explanations, "Second floor. First door to your right," and held him despairing in the cage until three other passengers came one by one at their leisure. He had the feeling of a man in a nightmare shouting for help to people who passed him either deaf or horribly indifferent. And it was as if he had wakened to the comforting realities when he came to the open door of the court-room and looked over the heads of the spectators on their benches and saw Wickson talking at the counsels' table with a young lawyer in spectacles. His suspected assassin, Plummer, was nowhere to be seen. The whole thing had evidently been a ridiculous false alarm, and Arnett felt suddenly very foolish.
The judge had not yet entered from his chambers. There were only three jurors in the jury-box—for the others were still to be chosen from the panel. A buzz of low-voiced conversation hung over the groups of lawyers, court officers, and privileged spectators within the rail; and those in the public seats coughed and scuffled their feet, uneasily expectant. In the light of high windows the room was shabbily ugly, with walls painted a sort of greasy robin's-egg blue and its cheap furnishings worn by the contact of innumerable bodies—as repellent as a prison, as sordid as the tragedies that had soiled it, as if the beautiful ideals of justice had left it to be a place only for the craftiness of statutory law.
Arnett sat down in a back seat, intimidated by the crowd of strangers, shy of his intrusion upon the business of the court, and vaguely depressed by the commonplace and sordid aspect of the reality before him. He was an idealist in art.
He sat watching Wickson. The detective, Collins, was also watching Wickson, but with a very different sort of eye.
The District Attorney was consulting with an assistant over a jury-list of typewritten names, each name of which was followed by a few brief notes that represented Collins's work of investigation; and this investigation had been made, with Collins's usual ingenious audacity, by a man who had pretended to be working for the city directory. Collins was proud of the job. He noticed that Wickson looked at it without interest, absent-mindedly.
He was again aware of the same thing in Wickson's manner that had worried him during his interview with the District Attorney when they had spoken about Cooney and the police plot. Collins might not have been able to say what it was that worried him, any more than Arnett could; yet it had worried Arnett, too, though it had expressed itself to him in Wickson's air of genial superiority to the sculptor. And there can be no doubt that it was this dimly felt emotion in Wickson, detached and dangerous, that moved him to involve himself now in the final catastrophe of the day.
While Wickson was standing inside the rail Cooney, the ex-policeman, slunk into the court- room and loitered there, leaning against the rear wall—a disheveled, unshaven, blowsy derelict of a man, horrible, but pathetic. Plummer had followed him in, and Plummer went at once to notify Collins. He tapped Collins on the shoulder from behind, and Collins turned his head away from Wickson while Plummer whispered in his ear.
At that moment Wickson himself saw Cooney, and saw him with pity, obviously, and with a desire to aid him. He said a word of excuse to his assistant for leaving the jury-list, passed the rail, and came down the court-room aisle toward the ex-policeman. He came toward Arnett also, and the sculptor half rose from his seat before he realized that Wickson was not aware of him. There was a look of solemn friendliness and sympathy in the District Attorney's face as he went by—a look that ignored Arnett and yet moved him to turn and watch.
Wickson put his hand on Cooney's shoulder. "I'm glad to see you out again, Cooney," he said. "I've been mighty sorry for what happened. I had to do it. We all have to do things sometimes that we don't want to do. But if I can help you in any way now, I want to know it."
Cooney scowled up at him out of bloodshot and befuddled eyes, dropped the puffed lids sulkily, and muttered something unintelligible.
"I've never felt it was your fault," Wickson went on. "I know what it is to be a policeman in this town. I know what the conditions are. If you think of any way that I can help you to make a fresh start, come and see me, will you?"
Cooney looked up again, and there was the beginning of a maudlin self-pity in his bleary gaze.
"I don't want to fight vice any more," Wickson said—with his absurd seriousness that never saw itself incongruous in any circumstances. "I want to fight the conditions that make vice."
But by this time Collins had seen what had happened, and had seen, too, the danger of it. "Look out!" he warned Plummer.
He started to make his way down a side aisle so as to reach Cooney from the flank. Plummer, less experienced, started hastily down the center aisle in full view of Cooney, and Cooney, looking over Wickson's shoulder, saw the detective coming.
Instantly into that drunken brain there must have flashed a suspicion that Wickson was trying to hold him with a show of friendliness until Plummer could seize and search him. He cursed out an oath, and threw his hand back to his hip pocket. Plummer saw the movement and plucked out his own revolver. Arnett immediately sprang from his seat and threw himself on the detective, still mistaking him for an assassin. At the same moment Cooney's revolver exploded in Wickson's face and Collins shot at Cooney.
The ex-policeman leaped as if he had been speared in the side, and fell, screaming. The District Attorney staggered back with his hands to his face. Collins caught him. "Are you hurt?"
Wickson relaxed with a tired sigh that slowly shuddered down to a choking catch in the throat where the blood strangled it.
11
At the mass-meeting of indignant citizens who gathered to pass resolutions upon this "irremediable loss to the community" a subscription was started to pay for a "suitable memorial" of the tragedy; and the list of subscribers, as published in the morning paper, began magnificently with the names of William D. Bradford and McPhee Harris. It was Bradford, as president of the Wickson Memorial Committee, who formally handed over the completed monument to the Mayor at its unveiling; and he stood, proudly modest, on the wooden platform, before the transfixed figure of Wickson turned to bronze, while the Mayor felicitated himself and the city upon "the possession in our midst of a citizen whose public spirit puts him always in the forefront of every public movement to—to beautify, to—to elevate—to raise the tone of our public life both by his private benefactions and his activity as a citizen of the public life of our city."
Wickson's white-haired mother, a little deaf, on the back row of the platform seats, heard the burst of applause, thought the Mayor was speaking of her son, and wiped a flattered tear from her cheek.
The bronze face of her son, above them all, remained exaltedly impassive. Arnett had done him from his early photographs, before worry and illness had hardened the lines of his face. He stood on his granite pedestal, sacrificially erect, with one arm doubled across the small of his back to grasp the other at the elbow in a characteristic attitude that made him look as if he were waiting to be shot, with his arms pinioned, his chin held high, confronting eternity. At the foot of his pedestal a bronze "Grief" crouched, weeping in her hair.
It was McPhee Harris who started the public protest against the semi-nudity of this crouching figure. Fortunately the protest failed of effect. Arnett's "Grief" is now rather more widely known than Wickson himself. It will probably be famous to a posterity that will have no very accurate knowledge of the event which the memorial was erected to commemorate.
THE END