The Edgar Pangborn Megapack

by Edgar Pangborn

  “Did she say any more, that month, about suicide?”

  “Indirectly, yes. One evening we got into a sort of general talk, just kicking ideas around. She said some individuals are deficient in the will to live; living is desiring, she said, and such people don’t desire strongly enough for a complete effort to stay alive. Well—something in it if you’re speaking of certain pathological cases—catatonics I think the doctors call them—patients who just lie around, won’t eat or even move, a kind of death in life. But that’s so far from anything in Callista’s make-up, I couldn’t believe she was talking indirectly about herself. She said not all zombis are in the psychopathic hospitals. Later—this did alarm me—she remarked that she’d have no problems worth mentioning if she could discover any purpose in existence. A depressive remark, certainly. She wouldn’t have said it if she hadn’t felt she was losing her hold on things, losing her interest in living—and if I understand it correctly, Mr. Warner, that loss of interest is the danger sign. People can talk a lot about killing themselves, and nothing happens. But if the interest in living goes—”

  “Objection! This is exactly the sort of thing I was afraid of, your Honor. I don’t care what she calls it, Miss Nolan is now lecturing us like a professional psychiatrist, and I object.”

  “Overruled.” I believe I snapped; the rumble on the left is the noise of calf-bound law books revolving in the grave. “The Court has not received the impression that the witness is claiming any professional standing in psychiatry. The remark you object to, Mr. Hunter, was a general one, to be sure; but she was speaking of matters that are either common knowledge or ought to be. I must rule that the defense is within its rights to let her follow this line, to help clarify her testimony on matters of fact.” And where in the pluperfect hell do I dig up a precedent on that one?

  “Exception.”

  “Yes. You may complete what you were saying, Miss Nolan.”

  “If the interest in living is gone—I mean the simple wish to stay alive and see what will happen next—then I think there’s real danger of a suicide. And as the Judge said, Mr. Warner, I guess that’s pretty much common knowledge. Callista herself was certainly aware of it, from her reading, her general education. Well, that remark about discovering any purpose in existence—I caught Callista up on that, I remember. I reminded her that we make and choose our own purposes—” (Watch it, Red!)—“so far as we know them.” She understood the danger, probably, the risk of touching on any questions that, for most of the jury, were settled on Sunday morning and decently ignored the rest of the week. “She—thought about that, I’m sure, and for a while I think she came part way out of her depression. Not all the way.”

  “Summing up then, Miss Nolan: knowing her as you do, and seeing her, I suppose, every week-day during last July—you’re convinced that most of that time she was behaving like one in the grip of a serious depression with the possibility of suicide?”

  “I don’t have any doubt of it, Mr. Warner—now. I ought not to have been in doubt at the time. If anyone is guilty in this case it’s myself, because I ought to have stayed with her just about every minute until she won her way out of that mood. Then there would have been no chance for the horrible accident that makes it possible to charge her with—”

  “Objection!”

  “Objection sustained.” She looked up with understanding and no reproach. The man in private applauded her doubtless intentional violation of rules, while the Judge must condemn. “The witness’s answer will have to be stricken.” It comes to me, I did not add that the jury is to disregard it. That all right, Red?

  “Miss Nolan, I understand you weren’t present at a certain picnic in Shanesville last August 7th. Did you know about it at the time?”

  “Yes. I closed the studio that afternoon—the weather was impossibly hot. Cal said her mother was having one of her picnics, and thought she might go. Cal didn’t ordinarily care for that sort of thing, but I—oh, I guess I just told her to run along and have a good time.”

  “Did Callista speak later of seeing the Dohertys at that picnic?”

  “Yes, Monday. All she said was that they were there, and she hadn’t talked with either of them. I asked if she was—cured, and she said: ‘Oh, Edith, I can’t talk about it yet, I can’t.’ I had to let it go at that. All that week she was very blue. She was working hard—too hard; volunteered to straighten out some of my records. Afraid to relax, maybe.”

  “When did you last see Callista before her arrest?”

  “Friday, August 14th, when she left the studio after work.”

  “What did her mood seem to be at that time?”

  “Tired, unhappy, withdrawn—but maybe a little more composed. I knew that, left to herself and barring unforeseeable accidents, she’d find good and reasonable answers to her troubles, but—Mr. Warner, it’s strangely difficult to help anyone you love.”

  “Did you talk to her on the phone that week end any time?”

  “Yes, late Sunday afternoon, the 16th. My father was in town that day, a flying visit, unexpected. Callista had never met him. I wanted her to. I called her late in the afternoon, past 5:30 I think—to ask if she’d like to come over in the evening. She said she might, but there was something she had engaged to do first. She sounded very much better. Not happy, but—calm anyhow. She didn’t say what the engagement was, and didn’t make it sound like anything too important. It could have been a reference to Mrs. Doherty’s coming to see her—I mean, nothing Callista said was inconsistent with that. She could hardly have talked to me as calmly, almost cheerfully, as she did, if she’d still been overwrought or—or had known she was heading toward something disastrous.”

  “When she didn’t come to meet your father, did you call her?”

  “Tried to, a little after nine—that would have been when she was out in Shanesville, according to what she told the District Attorney. I wasn’t worried when she didn’t show up, just supposed that something had delayed her until too late, and that she’d bring me up to date when I saw her Monday.”

  “What was her usual time for coming to work in the morning?”

  “Any time before ten was all right with me. That Monday, August 17th, she telephoned me at about ten and said she was sick. Her voice was completely changed: flat, dead. I asked of course what was wrong. She said in the same tone, without hesitation: ‘I’ve been pregnant since June and last night I had a miscarriage.’ I told her I’d come over as soon as I could get rid of a client who was waiting in the studio. She said then in a very distressed way: ‘No no, Edith, please don’t!’ She insisted she was all right, and then for a moment or two she was almost incoherent, saying she—oh, refused to drag me into her troubles, things like that. I said nonsense, I was her friend and that’s what friends are for. Finally I asked if there was anyone with her, and she said no, but there would be presently. I thought she meant her mother or maybe her stepfather or both—she didn’t say so, it was just one of those mistaken impressions you get under stress.”

  “You didn’t go over?”

  “No, sir. I thought that if Mrs. Chalmers was there I’d likely just be crashing in and doing more harm than good. I called again, later. Busy signals. When I finally got through, about one-thirty, the phone was answered by some policeman who asked me a few dozen questions and was finally willing to tell me that Miss Blake had been detained for questioning on a certain matter, as he called it, and was at the courthouse, at Mr. Lamson’s office.”

  “Who was that policeman, if you recall?”

  “Gage or some such name.”

  One for the Chief of Detectives. The Judge will not smile. There is no reason to smile.

  “Did you then go to the District Attorney’s office, Miss Nolan?”

  “Yes.”

  “Were you given any information about your friend?”

 
; “No, sir, just a brush-off from some clerk. That’s when I started trying to call you, Mr. Warner.”

  “Yes. I have only one or two more questions, Miss Nolan. Did Callista ever express to you any hostility toward Ann Doherty?”

  “Never. I recall that she spoke of her several times, but never with hostility or resentment or anything suggesting jealousy. No exaggerated friendliness either. I got the impression they were—acquaintances.”

  “Well, for that matter, did you ever hear Callista speak maliciously about anyone?”

  “Never.”

  II

  “Your witness, Mr. Hunter.”

  Edith Nolan thought with an edge of panic: Is that all, Cecil? The Old Man’s face was saying a kind of good-bye to her, turning away, not apparently displeased or disappointed—satisfied rather, so far as one could hope to read a face that must also be presenting a front to the gaze of the jury. But there was so much more that ought to have been said! The intimate truths of personality, relation, individual quality, that become no longer small once your vision is clear enough to separate the general from the specific, to see the primary core of self and the universe its matrix at one and the same time, neither too much distorted. It seemed to Edith that she had hardly begun to talk to those twelve, who were certainly not all dull, not all hostile.

  Was there, for example, no way at all to explain that Callista had a comic brown mole near her navel, that when she was absorbed in reading her left forefinger twisted a black curl above her ear, always the same curl, the same small motion—and that these facts, alone and of themselves, were reasons as great, valid, finally convincing, as any of the other reasons why she must not be slain?

  Still it was not, ultimately, a question of explaining anything, of offering facts to twelve other minds with the assumption that they could view them as you did. They could not. If it isn’t in nature for two pairs of eyes ever to observe a simple physical object in quite the same manner, how grotesque to expect twelve minds to agree, or even approximate agreement, in the consideration of an abstract idea! What was needed, she thought, was that twelve minds should learn (here and now and very quickly) a type of humility in the face of the unknown that even the strongest and best schooled intelligences found it hard to achieve with study and leisure and every advantage of the past’s accumulated resources. Unknown indeed—these people knew nothing of Callista Blake. They never could, in the nature of things, know much, never acquire more than a brief distorted glimpse of her, and that under conditions so outrageously far from the daily norm that her actual self appeared to them as no more than the flicker of a shadow. The kindly and badly troubled little man up there on the bench knew far more about her than they did, simply because he was trained to observation and the disciplines of independent thought; and he knew only a trifle. How little I know myself, or ever will know!

  She controlled her face to the semblance of tranquillity. The long-jawed man had arrived with his athletic grace, a foot raised comfortably on the platform that elevated the witness chair, his charcoal-gray suit just right for the occasion, neat and grave like a uniform. At close range, Edith noticed his expression was not particularly cold or severe. His eyes were thoughtful, his features betrayed no ugly tension. What is cruelty anyway, and how do you read it in another? It seemed to be present like an occasional tic (but might not really be) in the vacuous face of that oaf Hoag in the front row of the jury box. But in T. J. Hunter? At the moment he looked like a solemn salesman about to give her a well-spoken pitch, say on insurance or a middle-priced car.

  “You would do virtually anything, would you not, for your friend Callista Blake?”

  “The best thing I can do for her is tell the truth about her and about these events, so far as I know it, and that I’ve done.”

  “Your answer is not quite responsive, Miss Nolan.”

  “I think it is, but I’ll be more specific if you wish. I would not commit crimes for Callista Blake or any other friend, if only because in the long run you do your friend no service that way—compounding wrong things instead of lessening them. And I would not lie for her on any important matter, because it happens the truth is best for her as well as for me.”

  “That’s quite a pragmatic attitude, isn’t it?”

  My, the high intellectual plane! “Naturalistic might be a better word, Mr. District Attorney, but pragmatic if you like. If an ethical principle isn’t at least theoretically practical in human affairs, I’d rather leave it in the books.”

  “I see your point.” If only you did! “You wouldn’t kill in defense of Callista Blake?”

  “Why, I might. If it’s a clear case of protecting a friend’s life, the law generally calls it justifiable homicide, doesn’t it?”

  “But for you it would have to be a clear case, is that right? I mean, you’re referring to something on the level of shooting a burglar to protect the household, something like that?”

  “I suppose so. I’ve never encountered any situation like that, so I really can’t predict how I’d behave.”

  “Let me make sure I understand your position, Miss Nolan. You do not believe in absolute ethical principles?”

  “Before I can answer that I must have your personal definition of the word ‘absolute’.”

  “You must be familiar with the term, are you not?”

  “Yes, but there would be at least five or six definitions of it in any unabridged dictionary, and I can’t know which one you have in mind unless you tell me.”

  “Well, I had in mind the meaning which I think is generally used in philosophical discussions: self-contained, self-dependent, ultimate, in other words free from the limitations of human error, human perception.”

  “Thank you.” He is a shade tougher than I thought. “In that case the answer would have to be that ethical principles are human achievements, human ways of thinking and acting, and I don’t see how a human activity can ever be free from the limitations of human error and human perception.”

  “Very plausible. I see you’ve done quite a bit of thinking along these lines. That is what you mean by what you called a—a naturalistic attitude, I think that was your term?”

  “In part, yes.”

  “Oh, there’s more?”

  “As a well-read man, Mr. Hunter, you must know that the conception of naturalistic ethics is at least as old as Confucius, that libraries have been filled with it, and that we could talk here on the subject until the end of next year with a great deal left unsaid.”

  “Well, I’m afraid there might be a fatigue factor.”

  “There might indeed.” Was I quick enough to steal some of that applause of witless laughter? “It would take quite a while just to find a little agreement on definitions and first premises.”

  “Maybe.” He looked downright friendly, she thought, until you noticed the rigid watchfulness. His smile was comfortable; he probably felt that the rumble of amusement was, on the whole, one for his side. It probably was. She risked a glance toward the jury. Most of them looked puzzled, but none really irritated except little Mr. Anson; Flint-face Fielding seemed coldly interested, but whether in a favorable or hostile way there was no telling. In Helen Butler Edith saw a tiny flicker, surely friendliness, as their eyes met for an instant. It might mean recognition and memory, but if Miss Butler had any thought of disqualifying herself because of a trivial meeting months ago when they had not even exchanged names, she would surely have done it already. Best not look at her again. “I think, Miss Nolan, I’d better go back to my original question. I gave you my definition of ‘absolute,’ you remember, and you said—which sounded reasonable to me—that human activity can’t very well be free from human error. Now, may I take that as a positive no to my earlier question: you do not believe in absolute ethical principles?”

  “Not quite, Mr. Hunter. Some ethical principles
take on the apparent quality of absolutes, or of universal law, simply because virtually all the members of a society endorse them. In other words we act as if those principles were absolutes, whether we can justify it logically or not. So let me put it this way: I believe in following certain ethical principles as strictly as though they had the nature of universal law, so long as my own conscience, my own intelligence, can agree to it.”

  “I see. But that means, doesn’t it, that your conscience is actually, to you, the supreme judge?”

  “In a sense it has to be.”

  “For example,” said Judge Mann suddenly, and Edith turned to him feeling as though he had reached out a hand to aid her in crossing slippery rocks above a torrent—“for example, if an individual accepts the orders or doctrines of an external authority, would you agree, Miss Nolan, that his acceptance is itself an act of his own conscience, or will, or intelligence?”

  “Yes, your Honor, that expresses what I had in mind.”

  The Judge said: “In fact the individual can have no dealings, no contact with ideas or doctrines or even with simple observation of the physical world, unless there is first a positive action of his own intelligence. Is this still in line with your thought, Miss Nolan?”

  “Yes, your Honor.”

  “And—I’ll be done in a moment, Mr. Hunter—and finally, would you agree, Miss Nolan, that this decidedly elementary fact is often overlooked in our everyday thinking, perhaps because it’s so obvious that we aren’t willing to give it a second glance or work out its implications?”