Spring Always Comes, page 6
As a matter of criticism it was inexcusable because Connie tried as hard as she could to make good on the job. Miss Ellis was aware of this, as was everyone else on the staff.
“What on earth have I done to her?” Connie demanded at last.
“Poor old thing,” Jane said unexpectedly. “No man has ever looked at her. She’s jealous because you have all the things she wants: beauty and youth and as much male admiration as you can cope with. You can afford to be generous, Connie.”
Over and over, the junior partner stopped at her desk to ask her to lunch, to suggest a theater, to leave a small bunch of fragrant violets, but Connie steadfastly refused to see him outside the office. For the most part, the exchanges between them were good-humored and lighthearted. Colin did not seem to be annoyed by her unvarying refusal of his invitations; instead, he was intrigued and increasingly interested in her. Her indifference proved to be a stimulating challenge.
Only once did Connie find herself trapped by her impulsive tongue, which she had tried so hard to guard. Colin had been more insistent than usual about her going to the theater with him.
“Don’t be a little dope,” he said when she refused the invitation. “You know what I think?” His eyes were laughing at her with a kind of challenge. “I think you are afraid you will find me too interesting.”
“You are quite mistaken, Mr. Emery,” Connie said, stung into annoyance by his confidence. “Playboys bore me.”
A sudden crash made her start. She turned her head. Stephen Emery had knocked a paper weight off a desk near them. Her heart sank. She had been rude to his brother. She would probably lose her job. She left the office, still fuming with anger over Colin’s assumption that any girl was his for the asking. And yet, just once, it would be fun to go to a theater, to be escorted by an attractive and attentive man, to break the monotonous routine of her days, the even more monotonous routine of her lonely evenings.
In spite of her promise, she had not, as she had foreseen, got in touch with the girls whom she had formerly known, girls who were, after all, a part of Sandra’s world rather than her own. About Sandra’s activities she was kept informed by the society pages of the Herald Tribune. Week after week, her picture appeared, attending an opening night, seen at a night club, sponsoring a charity ball.
Usually her escort was Jefferson Gray, looking unexpectedly remote and distinguished in evening clothes, not like the casual man in sweater and slacks whom she had known at Stony Brook. He had changed in other ways, too; he seemed older, graver; or perhaps the photographers had failed to catch him when his face was lighted by his engaging smile.
Several times, when loneliness clamped down on her, she was unbearably tempted to telephone Jeff, but she was stopped each time by her memory of Sandra saying, with that radiance in her face, “Give Jeff my love.”
But she could not shut Jeff out of her mind and heart; she could not avoid the snares set by her imagination. She never walked along a street without thinking that Jeff, too, might be walking there. Always she was unconsciously watching for him. More than once her heart had lurched when the carriage of a man’s head, his walk, the sound of his laughter had startled her into thinking that he was there, just in front of her.
The day of her impulsive outburst to Colin Emery Connie came home, tired and depressed, to find Lil busy getting dinner for them both.
“But we agreed that we would look after ourselves,” Connie protested.
“You can pay your share, but I like doing it,” Lil assured her. “I’ve been watching you. You just scramble eggs or open a can of soup. If I do say it, I’m a good cook. At heart I’m simply a typical housewife. You know, the kind they write about in the magazines for chain stores, the ones who care about what kind of soap powder they use, or floor wax, or the right lotion to keep their hands soft.”
Connie laughed. Lil Debaney in black velvet slacks and a gold blouse with bishop sleeves provided by Céleste, hair a brassy blond, false lashes fluttering, was as removed from a typical housewife as anything she could imagine.
“It’s true, just the same,” Lil said soberly. “I wear these clothes because Madame gives them to me, and they save my own, but I like to cook and keep house. I like looking after someone, don’t you? I’d like to have a husband and three or four nice, healthy, noisy children. I’d like a house in the country that wasn’t too grand for children to racket around in, and a great big yard where they could play without getting into traffic. I’d like them to know all the big simple things like horses and cattle and pigs and chickens before they learn about different makes of cars and planes. I’d like them to have toys they made for themselves and that stir their imaginations before they get guns and toy soldiers and trucks and things that go bang.” She laughed at herself but her eyes were sober.
Connie remembered how her father had warned her over and over not to judge people too quickly, telling her that even when she was sure she knew all about a person there was bound to be a lot left over that she hadn’t even guessed. She realized now that Lil had told her the simple truth. Under the sophisticated surface there was an essentially simple woman, warm-hearted and generous. She was popular, but though she had a great many dates she seemed to take seriously none of the young men who called her so assiduously.
“I’ll know the right one when I see him,” she told Connie. “I guess we all do. And I’m not settling for anything else.”
The home-cooked meal and Lil’s cheerful talk relaxed Connie. She was startled when Lil said unexpectedly, “You’re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen and yet you never have a date. Why, Connie?”
“Well, I — my father died only a short time ago, you know, and —”
After a while she added, trying to speak lightly, though her voice betrayed her. “I guess I’m a one-man woman.”
“You’ve found him?”
“And lost him. To marry him would be to destroy his future and to spoil the life of the best friend I have in the world.”
In an effort to escape from a dangerous subject, she plunged into an account of her problem with the persistent junior partner of Emery & Emery.
“Every working girl, and that means almost every girl, has to learn to cope with wolves,” Lil said sagely. “It’s a nuisance but what can you do? It’s just part of the pattern.”
“It’s not Junior who worries me most,” Connie confessed, “it’s the senior partner. He heard me rebuff Colin today. It would be so unfair to lose my job because Colin Emery is a wolf on the prowl. I only hope his brother doesn’t blame me.”
Seven
Early next morning, Stephen Emery made one of his rare appearances in the stenographer’s room. “Miss Wyndham,” he said.
Connie’s heart did a nose dive. This is it, she thought. She steadied her shaky voice, “Yes, Mr. Emery.”
“I’ll need someone in court this morning on the Brewer case. Will you come with me and bring your notebook, please?”
Her first thought was a surge of relief. She wasn’t going to be fired. Then her heart quailed. Something in the senior partner’s manner, unapproachable, inhuman, always terrified her. When she worked for him she was tense with nervousness. Then she told herself, “Other girls have done it, and they were frightened, too. I can do it.”
In the locker room she straightened her hair anxiously, studied the lines of the simple gray suit, adjusted a tiny black hat, pulled on a black coat with a huge cape collar, black gloves, and pushed notebook and pencils into her outsize handbag.
“The boy stood on the burning deck,” she recited to herself. Then she began to laugh. “And look what happened to him!”
The laughter relaxed her and she was completely poised when she went out to meet Emery. There was an unexpected glint of admiration in his rather cold eyes as he stood back to let her precede him into the elevator. The trip by taxi was a silent one.
When they arrived at the courthouse Emery explained what he required of her. She was not to make a verbatim report of proceedings. He could get all that from the court reporter. But he did want her to make notes of certain points.
Connie looked around her, wide-eyed. Up to now, law had been a matter of endless and perplexing documents of which she could rarely make head or tail. But in this place the law was put into practice; it became no longer paper work but the clash of interests between human beings which must be reconciled according to the rules of the land.
“Is this the first time you have ever been in court, Miss Wyndham?” Emery asked, seeing her absorbed interest in her surroundings.
When she nodded he smiled. “I hope you won’t be disillusioned. People raised on Perry Mason expect fireworks. The overwhelming percentage of cases may be very dull proceedings. Anyhow, this particular case will wind up today and go to the jury. As a matter of fact, I won’t be surprised if we get a verdict before we leave.”
Connie’s first impression was one of disappointment. Never having been in court before, she expected that the surroundings would have all the high dignity of the law itself. Having seen movies based on English trials, she would not have been surprised if the lawyers had appeared bedecked in wigs.
Instead, she found a drab and unimpressive room: a scattered crowd made up of people awaiting hearings in other courts, a few curiosity seekers and some, cold and pinched, who, she suspected, had simply come in from the street to rest their feet and get warm.
It was a bare, untidy room, with cigarette butts lying under the no smoking signs, newspapers, and even a bag containing an empty carton and the remains of a sandwich.
As she opened her notebook she was aware that Stephen Emery was studying her. As though I were a butterfly on a pin, she thought in annoyance; just some kind of inhuman specimen.
“Not enough majesty?” he asked, watching her expression with some amusement.
“Well, not much, certainly,” she admitted.
“The majesty,” he said quietly, “lies in the law itself. Not in the surroundings in which we find it administered. Remember, Miss Wyndham, that law is man’s bulwark against violence and injustice; it is his answer to anarchy and insecurity. It is the fruit of all our many, many centuries of groping toward civilization. It isn’t perfect but it’s the best we have. Making it better in its operation is the job of every one of us.”
She nodded, frowning.
“Not convinced?” he asked with a smile.
“Well,” she said uncertainly, “I was thinking of all the ways the law says no. Getting in our way. Slowing us up. Like ‘Stop’ signals, for instance, when we are driving.”
“And that,” he told her, “is where you are wrong. ‘Stop’ signals are the best justification for the law that I know. Traffic laws, Miss Wyndham, don’t slow us up. They speed us up. Have you ever seen a traffic jam where there were no signals? What happened? Everyone tried to get ahead and as a result they were all blocked in complete confusion. Traffic laws keep us all moving faster — and safer.”
When Emery’s client appeared at the counsel table, he proved to be a thin, worn, worried-looking man of fifty. A helpless sort of man, this Gerry Brewster, Connie thought. One who would always do his best, one who was honest to the core, but gullible, easily tricked. He watched Emery with the look of a man holding on to his only firm support. At once Connie discovered a warm partisanship. She was firmly on the side of the client.
In spite of the setting for the case, this drab courtroom with paint peeling from the walls and a crack in the plaster on the ceiling, the atmosphere changed with the arrival of the principal figure. The white-haired judge, his face illuminated by the morning sun, seemed to her the incarnation of justice. The clerk of the court, the counsel at their tables, the policemen standing like sentinels, all took on a certain awesome dignity in his presence.
As the case unfolded, Connie was as deeply interested in it as though this were a play. She picked up threads of what had gone before, accusations and counter-accusations, listened to the evidence as it was brought out by the witnesses. For the first time she was aware of the intricacies of the law and of the power for good and evil wielded by a lawyer.
Watching Emery, she was aware that here was a man who had found the job that was right for him to do in life and who was doing it with all his heart. For the first time she realized that idleness, however luxurious it might be, could never provide the rich satisfactions of work well done.
Perhaps this case lacked the high drama of a Perry Mason courtroom scene, but it had its own kind of drama and conflict. Watching almost breathlessly, Connie became aware that the evidence was being presented for the consideration of the twelve good men and true in the jury box. What counted in the long run was the way in which they would understand and interpret it. This was a job of enormous responsibility and importance; without it the whole system would break down.
She began to watch the jurymen eagerly. None of them, it seemed to her, were particularly interested in the testimony. In fact, one of them was frankly dozing half the time. He missed most of Emery’s telling points. It was only the violent pounding on the table of the plaintiff’s lawyer that woke him up, and he looked resentfully around him as though his slumber should not have been disturbed.
When the judge had issued his instructions and the jury had been led away, Emery stacked papers neatly and put them in his briefcase.
“Aren’t you worried, wondering what they will decide?” Connie demanded eagerly, forgetting that she was there only to take notes.
He looked rather surprised. “I never waste energy on worry,” he told her. “I have done the best I can. From now on it is up to the jury.” He turned, rested his hand briefly on his client’s shoulder, and said, “There is a man I want to see. Will you hold the fort, Miss Wyndham? If by any chance the jury arrives at a verdict within the next hour will you call me at this number, please?”
Thinking about her new idea of law and the rewards of doing one’s job and doing it well, which she had not suspected up to now, Connie was unaware of the passage of time. She was startled when there was a stir, a whisper, and someone said, “Quick work. The jury is coming back.”
Connie ran in search of a telephone, dialed the number Emery had given her. He would, he assured her, be there at once.
In a surprisingly short time he joined her, and a few minutes later his client appeared, looking more haggard, more anxious than ever, his hands twisting restlessly. The plaintiff and the opposing counsel sat at another table, a couple of reporters appeared. Then the jury filed in and the judge made his appearance.
Connie had been so completely convinced by Emery’s arguments that she sat in stunned surprise while the jury foreman announced the verdict, awarding forty thousand dollars to the plaintiff.
The defendant looked at his lawyer with discouraged eyes, his tired shoulders slumped in despair. “How am I going to raise that money? He knew perfectly well the intent of my aunt’s will.”
“Hard luck,” Emery agreed.
“You did your best. I know that.”
The defendant went away and Connie closed her notebook with shaking hands.
Emery glanced at his watch. “Good heavens, I had no idea it was so late, and you haven’t had any lunch. Won’t you join me, Miss Wyndham, before you get back to the office?”
“Why — thank you.”
Sitting across from him in a famous restaurant she was unaware of the curious eyes that watched their table. Emery was a familiar figure there but he was not often seen with a woman, certainly not with one as young and beautiful as this.
“Perhaps,” the lawyer said at last, “you would prefer to order something else if you don’t like that.”
Connie realized then that she had been pushing her food around her plate without eating it. “If that group of men,” she burst out, so carried away by indignation that she forgot to be afraid of the senior partner, “men who look reasonably intelligent, could listen to that evidence and then decide against your client, I don’t think much of your renowned jury system.”
Ever since the meal began he had been studying her, the exquisite but unstressed grooming, the face that held intelligence and character as well as unusual beauty, the warm generosity that now flushed her face with indignation, the clear, steady eyes.
“There’s nothing the matter with the jury system, Miss Wyndham,” he said in his quiet voice. “What it needs is better material. To the best of my belief there was not a man on that jury who was capable of weighing the evidence.”
“Then why weren’t there some of that type, Mr. Emery?” Connie asked hotly. “This country has plenty of intelligent people who want the law to be administered well. Millions and millions of them. Why weren’t they there?”
He smiled and she realized that when he relaxed he did not look so severe. “That is a good question. The trouble is that when they are called for jury duty, they ask to be excused.”
“But why?” she insisted.
“Chiefly, I think, because they have never sat, as you have just done, and seen justice perverted because of ineptitude and indifference. They, the people who try to escape jury duty, prefer to leave the job to someone else, though it is one of their most important duties as citizens. Their real reason for this is simply that they don’t care. The excuses they make are something else.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, for instance, they claim that their business will fail or they will suffer from some great financial disaster; they cite ill health when they probably intend to play golf; they imply they are so essential to their jobs that they are irreplaceable, though, as we all learn in time, no one is irreplaceable.
“And yet, Miss Wyndham, they are the very people who cry the loudest for good men on the jury when they themselves have legal difficulties. No, you must not blame the law or the courts for what is, to some degree, the fault of most of the people I know and probably of those you know. There are few of them, men or women, who won’t dodge jury duty when they can.” For the first time a touch of the desperate urgency he felt was betrayed by his voice. “If only they could be made to realize that they can’t afford not to serve.”
