off, for there was a sudden and growing interruption. An epidemic of head turning had broken out and was spreading rapidly from one corner of the hall until it had affected the whole assemblage. Someone had discovered John Jackson behind the post in the corner, and first an exclamation and then a growing mumble that mounted to a cheer swept over the auditorium.
Suddenly two men had taken him by the arms and set him on his feet, and then he was pushed and pulled and carried toward the platform, arriving somehow in a standing position after having been lifted over many heads.
They were all standing now, arms waving wildly, voices filling the hall with tumultuous clamor. Someone in the back of the hall began to sing “For he’s a jolly good fellow,” and five hundred voices took up the air and sang it with such feeling, with such swelling emotion, that all eyes were wet and the song assumed a significance far beyond the spoken words.
This was John Jackson’s chance now to say to these people that he had got so little out of life. He stretched out his arms in a sudden gesture and they were quiet, listening, every man and woman and child.
“I have been asked——” His voice faltered. “My dear friends, I have been asked to—to tell you what I have got out of life——”
Five hundred faces, touched and smiling, every one of them full of encouragement and love and faith, turned up to him.
“What have I got out of life?”
He stretched out his arms wide, as if to include them all, as if to take to his breast all the men and women and children of this city. His voice rang in the hushed silence.
“Everything!”
At six o’clock, when he walked up his street alone, the air was already cool with evening. Approaching his house, he raised his head and saw that someone was sitting on the outer doorstep, resting his face in his hands. When John Jackson came up the walk, the caller—he was a young man with dark, frightened eyes—saw him and sprang to his feet.
“Father,” he said quickly, “I got your telegram, but I—I came home.”
John Jackson looked at him and nodded.
“The house was locked,” said the young man in an uneasy way.
“I’ve got the key.”
John Jackson unlocked the front door and preceded his son inside.
“Father,” cried Ellery Jackson quickly, “I haven’t any excuse to make—anything to say. I’ll tell you all about it if you’re still interested—if you can stand to hear——”
John Jackson rested his hand on the young man’s shoulder.
“Don’t feel too badly,” he said in his kind voice. “I guess I can always stand anything my son does.”
This was an understatement. For John Jackson could stand anything now forever—anything that came, anything at all.
— ◆ —
The Pusher-in-the-Face.
Woman’s Home Companion (February 1925)
The last prisoner was a man—his masculinity was not much in evidence, it is true; he would perhaps better be described as a “person,” but he undoubtedly came under that general heading and was so classified in the court record. He was a small, somewhat shriveled, somewhat wrinkled American who had been living along for probably thirty-five years.
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
