“Call the plaintiff,” said the judge, sitting up a little in his chair. “Let’s hear what she has to say.”
The courtroom, sparsely crowded and unusually languid in the hot afternoon, had become suddenly alert. Several men in the back of the room moved into benches near the desk and a young reporter leaned over the clerk’s shoulder and copied the defendant’s name on the back of an envelope.
The plaintiff arose. She was a woman just this side of fifty with a determined, rather overbearing face under yellowish white hair. Her dress was a dignified black and she gave the impression of wearing glasses; indeed the young reporter, who believed in observation, had so described her in his mind before he realized that no such adornment sat upon her thin, beaked nose.
It developed that she was Mrs. George D. Robinson of 1219 Riverside Drive. She had always been fond of the theater and sometimes she went to the matinee. There had been two ladies with her yesterday, her cousin, who lived with her, and a Miss Ingles — both ladies were in court.
This is what had occurred:
As the curtain went up for the first act a woman sitting behind had asked her to remove her hat. Mrs. Robinson had been about to do so anyhow, and so she was a little annoyed at the request and had remarked as much to Miss Ingles and her cousin. At this point she had first noticed the defendant who was sitting directly in front, for he had turned around and looked at her quickly in a most insolent way. Then she had forgotten his existence until just before the end of the act when she made some remark to Miss Ingles — when suddenly he had stood up, turned around and pushed her in the face.
“Was it a hard blow?” asked the judge at this point.
“A hard blow!” said Mrs. Robinson indignantly, “I should say it was. I had hot and cold applications on my nose all night.”
“ — on her nose all night.”
This echo came from the witness bench where two faded ladies were leaning forward eagerly and nodding their heads in corroboration.
“Were the lights on?” asked the judge.
No, but everyone around had seen the incident and some people had taken hold of the man right then and there.
This concluded the case for the plaintiff. Her two companions gave similar evidence and in the minds of everyone in the courtroom the incident defined itself as one of unprovoked and inexcusable brutality.
The one element which did not fit in with this interpretation was the physiognomy of the prisoner himself. Of any one of a number of minor offenses he might have appeared guilty — pickpockets were notoriously mild-mannered, for example — but of this particular assault in a crowded theater he seemed physically incapable. He did not have the kind of voice or the kind of clothes or the kind of mustache that went with such an attack.
“Charles David Stuart,” said the judge, “you’ve heard the evidence against you?”
“Yes.”
“And you plead guilty?”
“Yes.”
“Have you anything to say before I sentence you?”
“No.” The prisoner shook his head hopelessly. His small hands were trembling.
“Not one word in extenuation of this unwarranted assault?”
The prisoner appeared to hesitate.
“Go on,” said the judge. “Speak up — it’s your last chance.”
“Well,” said Stuart with an effort, “she began talking about the plumber’s stomach.”
There was a stir in the courtroom. The judge leaned forward.
“What do you mean?”
“Why, at first she was only talking about her own stomach to — to those two ladies there” — he indicated the cousin and Miss Ingles — “and that wasn’t so bad. But when she began talking about the plumber’s stomach it got different.”
“How do you mean — different?”
Charles Stuart looked around helplessly.
“I can’t explain,” he said, his mustache wavering a little, “but when she began talking about the plumber’s stomach you — you had to listen.”
A snicker ran about the courtroom. Mrs. Robinson and her attendant ladies on the bench were visibly horrified. The guard took a step nearer as if at a nod from the judge he would whisk off this criminal to the dingiest dungeon in Manhattan.
But much to his surprise the judge settled himself comfortably in his chair.
“Tell us about it, Stuart,” he said not unkindly. “Tell us the whole story from the beginning.”
This request was a shock to the prisoner and for a moment he looked as though he would have preferred the order of condemnation. Then after one nervous look around the room he put his hands on the edge of the desk, like the paws of a fox-terrier just being trained to sit up, and began to speak in a quivering voice.
“Well, I’m a night cashier, your honor, in T. Cushmael’s restaurant on Third Avenue. I’m not married” — he smiled a little, as if he knew they had all guessed that — “and so on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons I usually go to the matinee. It helps to pass the time till dinner. There’s a drug store, maybe you know, where you can get tickets for a dollar sixty-five to some of the shows and I usually go there and pick out something. They got awful prices at the box office now.” He gave out a long silent whistle and looked feelingly at the judge. “Four or five dollars for one seat — “
The judge nodded his head.
“Well,” continued Charles Stuart, “when I pay even a dollar sixty-five I expect to see my money’s worth. About two weeks ago I went to one of these here mystery plays where they have one fella that did the crime and nobody knows who it was. Well, the fun at a thing like that is to guess who did it. And there was a lady behind me that’d been there before and she gave it all away to the fella with her. Gee” — his face fell and he shook his head from side to side — “I like to died right there. When I got home to my room I was so mad that they had to come and ask me to stop walking up and down. Dollar sixty-five of my money gone for nothing.
“Well, Wednesday came around again, and this show was one show I wanted to see. I’d been wanting to see it for months, and every time I went into the drug store I asked them if they had any tickets. But they never did.” He hesitated. “So Tuesday I took a chance and went over to the box office and got a seat. Two seventy-five it cost me.” He nodded impressively. “Two seventy-five. Like throwing money away. But I wanted to see that show.”
Mrs. Robinson in the front row rose suddenly to her feet.
“I don’t see what all this story has to do with it,” she broke out a little shrilly. “I’m sure I don’t care — “
The judge brought his gavel sharply down on the desk.
“Sit down, please,” he said.
“This is a court of law, not a matinee.”
Mrs. Robinson sat down, drawing herself up into a thin line and sniffing a little as if to say she’d see about this after a while. The judge pulled out his watch.
“Go on,” he said to Stuart. “Take all the time you want.”
“I got there first,” continued Stuart in a flustered voice. “There wasn’t anybody in there but me and the fella that was cleaning up. After awhile the audience came in, and it got dark and the play started, but just as I was all settled in my seat and ready to have a good time I heard an awful row directly behind me. Somebody had asked this lady” — he pointed directly to Mrs. Robinson — “to remove her hat like she should of done anyhow and she was sore about it. She kept telling the two ladies that was with her how she’d been at the theater before and knew enough to take off her hat. She kept that up for a long time, five minutes maybe, and then every once in a while she’d think of something new and say it in a loud voice. So finally I turned around and looked at her because I wanted to see what a lady looked like that could be so inconsiderate as that. Soon as I turned back she began on me. She said I was insolent and then she said ‘Tchk! Tchk! Tchk!’ a lot with her tongue and the two ladies that was with her said ‘Tchk! Tchk! Tchk!’ until you could hardly hear yourself think, m
uch less listen to the play. You’d have thought I’d done something terrible.
“By and by, after they calmed down and I began to catch up with what was doing on the stage, I felt my seat sort of creak forward and then creak back again and I knew the lady had her feet on it and I was in for a good rock. Gosh!” he wiped his pale, narrow brow on which the sweat had gathered thinly, “it was awful. I hope to tell you I wished I’d never come at all. Once I got excited at a show and rocked a man’s chair without knowing it and I was glad when he asked me to stop. But I knew this lady wouldn’t be glad if I asked her. She’d of just rocked harder than ever.”
Some time before, the population of the courtroom had begun stealing glances at the middle-aged lady with yellowish-white hair. She was of a deep, life-like lobster color with rage.
“It got to be near the end of the act,” went on the little pale man, “and I was enjoying it as well as I could, seeing that sometimes she’d push me toward the stage and sometimes she’d let go, and the seat and me would fall back into place. Then all of a sudden she began to talk. She said she had an operation or something — I remember she said she told the doctor that she guessed she knew more about her own stomach than he did. The play was getting good just then — the people next to me had their handkerchiefs out and was weeping — and I was feeling sort of that way myself. And all of a sudden this lady began to tell her friends what she told the plumber about his indigestion. Gosh!” Again he shook his head from side to side; his pale eyes fell involuntarily on Mrs. Robinson — then looked quickly away. “You couldn’t help but hear some and I begun missing things and then missing more things and then everybody began laughing and I didn’t know what they were laughing at and, as soon as they’d leave off, her voice would begin again. Then there was a great big laugh that lasted for a long time and everybody bent over double and kept laughing and laughing, and I hadn’t heard a word. First thing I knew the curtain came down and then I don’t know what happened. I must of been a little crazy or something because I got up and closed my seat, and reached back and pushed the lady in the face.”
As he concluded there was a long sigh in the courtroom as though everyone had been holding in his breath waiting for the climax. Even the judge gasped a little and the three ladies on the witness bench burst into a shrill chatter and grew louder and louder and shriller and shriller until the judge’s gavel rang out again upon his desk.
“Charles Stuart,” said the judge in a slightly raised voice, “is this the only extenuation you can make for raising your hand against a woman of the plaintiff’s age?”
Charles Stuart’s head sank a little between his shoulders, seeming to withdraw as far as it was able into the poor shelter of his body.
“Yes, sir,” he said faintly.
Mrs. Robinson sprang to her feet.
“Yes, judge,” she cried shrilly, “and there’s more than that. He’s a liar too, a dirty little liar. He’s just proclaimed himself a dirty little — “
“Silence!” cried the judge in a terrible voice. “I’m running this court, and I’m capable of making my own decisions!” He paused. “I will now pronounce sentence upon Charles Stuart,” he referred to the register, “upon Charles David Stuart of 212 1/2 West 22nd St.”
The courtroom was silent. The reporter drew nearer — he hoped the sentence would be light — just a few days on the Island in lieu of a fine.
The judge leaned back in his chair and hid his thumbs somewhere under his black robe.
“Assault justified,” he said. “Case dismissed.”
The little man Charles Stuart came blinking out into the sunshine, pausing for a moment at the door of the court and looking furtively behind him as if he half expected that it was a judicial error. Then, sniffling once or twice, not because he had a cold but for those dim psychological reasons that make people sniff, he moved slowly south with an eye out for a subway station.
He stopped at a news-stand to buy a morning paper; then entering the subway was borne south to Eighteenth Street where he disembarked and walked east to Third Avenue. Here he was employed in an all-night restaurant built of glass and plaster white tile. Here he sat at a desk from curfew until dawn, taking in money and balancing the books of T. Cushmael, the proprietor. And here, through the interminable nights, his eyes, by turning a little to right or left, could rest upon the starched linen uniform of Miss Edna Schaeffer.
Miss Edna Schaeffer was twenty-three, with a sweet mild face and hair that was a living example of how henna should not be applied. She was unaware of this latter fact, because all the girls she knew used henna just this way, so perhaps the odd vermilion tint of her coiffure did not matter.
Charles Stuart had forgotten about the color of her hair long ago — if he had ever noticed its strangeness at all. He was much more interested in her eyes, and in her white hands which, as they moved deftly among piles of plates and cups, always looked as if they should be playing the piano. He had almost asked her to go to a matinee with him once, but when she had faced him her lips half-parted in a weary, cheerful smile, she had seemed so beautiful that he had lost courage and mumbled something else instead.
It was not to see Edna Schaeffer, however, that he had come to the restaurant so early in the afternoon. It was to consult with T. Cushmael, his employer, and discover if he had lost his job during his night in jail. T. Cushmael was standing in the front of the restaurant looking gloomily out the plate-glass window, and Charles Stuart approached him with ominous forebodings.
“Where’ve you been?” demanded T. Cushmael.
“Nowhere,” answered Charles Stuart discreetly.
“Well, you’re fired.”
Stuart winced.
“Right now?”
Cushmael waved his hands apathetically.
“Stay two or three days if you want to, till I find somebody. Then” — he made a gesture of expulsion — “outside for you.”
Charles Stuart assented with a weary little nod. He assented to everything. At nine o’clock, after a depressed interval during which he brooded upon the penalty of spending a night among the police, he reported for work.
“Hello, Mr. Stuart,” said Edna Schaeffer, sauntering curiously toward him as he took his place behind the desk. “What became of you last night? Get pinched?”
She laughed, cheerfully, huskily, charmingly he thought, at her joke.
“Yes,” he answered on a sudden impulse, “I was in the Thirty-fifth Street jail.”
“Yes, you were,” she scoffed.
“That’s the truth,” he insisted, “I was arrested.”
Her face grew serious at once.
“Go on. What did you do?”
He hesitated.
“I pushed somebody in the face.”
Suddenly she began to laugh, at first with amusement and then immoderately.
“It’s a fact,” mumbled Stuart, “I almost got sent to prison account of it.”
Setting her hand firmly over her mouth Edna turned away from him and retired to the refuge of the kitchen. A little later, when he was pretending to be busy at the accounts, he saw her retailing the story to the two other girls.
The night wore on. The little man in the grayish suit with the grayish face attracted no more attention from the customers than the whirring electric fan over his head. They gave him their money and his hand slid their change into a little hollow in the marble counter. But to Charles Stuart the hours of this night, this last night, began to assume a quality of romance. The slow routine of a hundred other nights unrolled with a new enchantment before his eyes. Midnight was always a sort of a dividing point — after that the intimate part of the evening began. Fewer people came in, and the ones that did seemed depressed and tired: a casual ragged man for coffee, the beggar from the street corner who ate a heavy meal of cakes and a beefsteak, a few nightbound street-women and a watchman with a red face who exchanged warning phrases with him about his health.
Midnight seemed to come early tonight and
business was brisk until after one. When Edna began to fold napkins at a nearby table he was tempted to ask her if she too had not found the night unusually short. Vainly he wished that he might impress himself on her in some way, make some remark to her, some sign of his devotion that she would remember forever.
She finished folding the vast pile of napkins, loaded it onto the stand and bore it away, humming to herself. A few minutes later the door opened and two customers came in. He recognized them immediately, and as he did so a flush of jealousy went over him. One of them, a young man in a handsome brown suit, cut away rakishly from his abdomen, had been a frequent visitor for the last ten days. He came in always at about this hour, sat down at one of Edna’s tables, and drank two cups of coffee with lingering ease. On his last two visits he had been accompanied by his present companion, a swarthy Greek with sour eyes who ordered in a loud voice and gave vent to noisy sarcasm when anything was not to his taste.
It was chiefly the young man, though, who annoyed Charles Stuart. The young man’s eyes followed Edna wherever she went, and on his last two visits he had made unnecessary requests in order to bring her more often to his table.
“Good evening, girlie,” Stuart heard him say to-night. “How’s tricks?”
“O.K.,” answered Edna formally. “What’ll it be?”
“What have you?” smiled the young man. “Everything, eh? Well, what’d you recommend?”
Edna did not answer. Her eyes were staring straight over his head into some invisible distance.
He ordered finally at the urging of his companion. Edna withdrew and Stuart saw the young man turn and whisper to his friend, indicating Edna with his head.
Stuart shifted uncomfortably in his seat. He hated that young man and wished passionately that he would go away. It seemed as if his last night here, his last chance to watch Edna, and perhaps even in some blessed moment to talk to her a little, was marred by every moment this man stayed.
Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated) Page 311