"All rise!" Mr. Delehanty's tenor burbled the lusciousness of a clarinet. "The Honorable Judge of the Court of General Sessions in and for the County of Winchester!" Judge Mann saw them rise, for what the tradition said he must be and therefore was. "All persons having business before this honorable court draw near, give your attention, and you shall be heard!" Seating himself with a twinge of annoyance at pomp and circumstance, Mann observed a virgin scratch-pad beside his minute-book. He suspected Mr. Delehanty of rescuing judicial doodles from the wastebasket: to Mr. Delehanty any new judge was a potential Great Man till the bloom wore off. "This court is now in session."

Three years a judge, less than a year in General Sessions--it had been sure to come, the first case overshadowed by the death penalty. He had faced the certainty and argued it out with himself, well before those scrambled days of the election campaign two years ago which had settled him securely in office after the uncertainty of an interim appointment. He had supposed the answers he arrived at then were still valid: The law is man-made, therefore imperfect: as its servant, my function is simply to interpret, trusting that time and natural process will permit the law to continue growing, not petrifying, as men gradually become a little wiser (if they do). And so on--respectable answers, unoriginal but having the sanction of history, of just and generous minds. Yet last night, after a final reading of the grand jury minutes in the Blake case, he could not sleep. And this morning, so far, he was merely insisting to himself that those answers had better stay valid, since the sovereign state of New Essex was stuck with him for another twelve years.

Perhaps, he thought, his uneasiness was not so much at the ethical position as at the Blake case itself--too one-sided. He saw at present no good prospects for defense counsel Cecil Warner except in delaying actions, skirmishes, the unpredictable chances of courtroom drama, and the doctrine of reasonable doubt--which is, to be sure, a doctrine broad enough to take in the whole expanse of human affairs, philosophically and not legally speaking.

He surveyed the arena, wiping his reading glasses, hoping his eyes didn't look too bloodshot. The prospective talesmen spilled into the rows beyond the press tables. Then the anonymous; and from outside, a beehive snarl of the disappointed, who might dwindle away presently, unless the papers had succeeded at blowing the case up into a sexual circus. Portraits of the dead woman showed a pretty face, but Ann Doherty had after all been a respectable suburban housewife, not a glamour 

 Prev. P 2/264 next