Part 52 (1/2)
”Then it can do the other thing.”
Bob's tone became significant.
”And you realize what-what the other thing might be?”
”You bet I do! You can't live in Murderers' Row without having _that_ rubbed into you.”
They talked softly, in a corner of the visitors' room, because other little groups were scattered about, each centering round some sullen, swarthy man, wreathed in mystery and darkness.
”That's all right, old chap,” Bob agreed; ”but you see, don't you, that it's only a stand for an idea?”
”It's a stand for telling the truth, isn't it?”
”The truth-as you see it?”
”The truth as it is-as I'm willing to bank on it.”
”Banking on it in a way that-that may call for a great deal of pluck.”
”Well, I've got a great deal of pluck.”
”Yes-if you've got enough. It's one thing to say so now, and another to prove it when the time comes.”
In his suppressed vehemence Teddy grasped Bob's wrist, as the hands of both lay on the small table above which their heads came together.
”I've got the pluck for anything but to go before their court and say what you want me to say. I took the money because my father and mother, after slaving for society all their lives, had a right to it; I shot a man because they'd got me so jumpy with all the wrongs they'd done me that I didn't know what my hand was up to. If they won't let me have my kind of justice, they'll just have to dope me out their own, and I'll swallow it.”
Another conversation, in the same spot, and with heads together in the same way, was gentler.
”I know pretty well what they're going to hand me out-and it'll be all right. What kind of life would I have now, even if they acquitted me?
What could I have had even if I'd never got into this sc.r.a.pe at all? I'm not cut out for big things. I'm just the same size as poor old dad, and I'd have gone the same way. Ma's got it straight-it's not good enough.
Think of rotting in an office all your life just to reach the gorgeous sum of forty-five a week, and when you've got it to be chucked into the h.e.l.l of the unemployed! Say, Bob, why can't everyone have enough in a world where there's plenty to go round?”
”I guess it's because we haven't the right kind of world.”
”But why haven't we? We've been at it long enough.”
”Perhaps not. That may be where the trouble lies. When life came on this planet, to begin with, it took millions of years to get it anywhere.
n.o.body knows how long it was before the thing that lived in the water could creep on the land; but it was time to be reckoned by ages. When you come to ages, the human race is young. It's made a life for itself which it doesn't know how to swing. In a few more ages it may learn; but it hasn't learned as yet.”
Teddy reflected.
”So you've just got to take it as it is.”
”That seems to be the number. We may kick because it isn't perfect, but we don't know how to make it perfect, and that's all there is to say.”
”It's easier for your kind to say than for ours.”