His body looked as if it had been left by accident in his suit the last time it went to the tailor’s and pressed out with hot, heavy irons to its present sharpness. His face was merely a face. It was the kind of face that makes up crowds, grey in color with ears that shrank back against the head as if fearing the clamor of the city, and with the tired, tired eyes of one whose forebears have been underdogs for five thousand years.
Brought into the dock between two towering Celts in executive blue he seemed like the representative of a long-extinct race, a very fagged-out and shriveled elf who had been caught poaching on a buttercup in Central Park.
“What’s your name?”
“Stuart.”
“Stuart what?”
“Charles David Stuart.”
The clerk recorded it without comment in the book of little crimes and great mistakes.
“Age?”
“Thirty.”
“Occupation?”
“Night cashier.”
The clerk paused and looked at the judge. The judge yawned.
“Wha’s charge?” he asked.
“The charge is”—the clerk looked down at the notation in his hand—“the charge is that he pushed a lady in the face.”
“Pleads guilty?”
“Yes.”
The preliminaries were now disposed of. Charles David Stuart, looking very harmless and uneasy, was on trial for assault and battery.
The evidence disclosed, rather to the judge’s surprise, that the lady whose face had been pushed was not the defendant’s wife.
On the contrary the victim was an absolute stranger—the prisoner had never seen her before in his life. His reasons for the assault had been two: first, that she talked during a theatrical performance; and, second, that she kept joggling the back of his chair with her knees. When this had gone on for some time he had turned around and without any warning pushed her severely in the face.
“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 theatre 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 theatre 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,”