“Take a vote!” snarled Mert Isbel again, making a fist.
Johnny turned to the wall.
Okay, brethren. I’m through.
“Neighbors!” It was Samuel Sheare’s voice. Johnny turned around, surprised. He had forgotten all about Samuel Sheare. “Neighbors, before we take a vote... As you would that men should do to you, do you also to them likewise... Be you merciful, even as your Father is merciful. And judge not, and you shall not be judged; and condemn not, and you shall not be condemned; release, and you shall be released. Isn’t there one here for whom these words mean somethin’? Don’t you understand them? Don’t they touch you? Neighbors, will you pray with me?”
Now we can both be happy in the discharge of our duty as we saw it, Johnny thought. Reason and the mercy that comes from faith. We’ve tried them both, Reverend.
And we’re both in the wrong pew.
“Pray for his whoreson’s soul,” grated Mert Isbel. “Take a vote.”
“We take a vote,” nodded Hubert Hemus. “Peter?”
Peter Berry passed out new pencils and small pads of fresh white paper. The pencils had sharp, sharp points.
“Write your verdicts,” directed Hemus.
And for a few seconds there was nothing in the air of Fanny Adams’s bedroom but the whisper of pencils.
Then the First Selectman collected the papers.
When he came to Calvin Waters, he said, “Why, Calvin, you ain’t wrote nothin’.”
Laughing Waters looked up in an agony of intellectual effort. “How do ye write ‘guilty’?”
They stood ten to two for conviction.
Two hours later Johnny and Reverend Sheare were backed against a highboy before a three-quarter circle of angry men and women.
“Ye think to deadlock us?” rumbled old Isbel. “Ye think to balk the will of the majority? Vote guilty!”
“Are you threatenin’ me, Merton Isbel?” asked Samuel Sheare. “Are you so far gone in hatred and passion that you’d force me to cast my lot with yours?”
“We’ll stay here till the cows dry up,” rasped Orville Pangman. “And then some!”
“It’s a conspiracy, that’s what it is,” spat Rebecca Hemus. “Puttin’ a minister on a jury!”
“And an out-and-out stranger,” said Emily Berry. “Ought to run him out o’ town!”
“And me,” sighed Mr. Sheare.
They were shouting and waving their arms. All but Hube Hemus. Hemus leaned against the chintz-hung window, jaws grinding, eyes on Johnny.
“Excuse me,” said Johnny in a tired voice. “It’s very close in here, good people. I’d like to go over to that corner and sit down.”
“Vote guilty!”
“Make him stand!”
“Throw him out!”
“Let him,” said Hemus.
They made way.
Johnny sank into the aged pine captain’s chair by the four-poster, wiping his face. Thinking came hard in this airless, supercharged room. What idiots they had been to think at all, to “plan” a “campaign.” This sort of mindless tenacity, he thought, can’t be argued or wheedled or prayed into letting go. It was a blind force, as manageable as the winds. It only went to prove what he had known for a long time now, that man was a chaos, without rhyme or reason; that he blundered about like a maddened animal in the delicate balance of the world, smashing and disrupting, eager only for his own destruction. Compared with the vast and plunging mob, how many beings of wisdom and order and creativeness stood out? A miserable few, working wonders, but always against mind-shattering odds, and doomed in the end to go down with their works, cities and prophets, appliances and arts. The first men to set foot on Mars would find, not goggle-eyed pinheads with antennae, or supermen, but lifeless fused deserts still radiating death. In the evolution of life there was no gene of the spirit; God, Who provided for all things, had left the most important thing out...
“Mr. Shinn.”
“Yes?” Johnny looked up. It was Samuel Sheare. The room was suddenly quiet. Hube Hemus was surrounded by his pliable neighbors, and he was whispering to them.
“I think,” said Mr. Sheare in a low voice, “somethin’ very bad is goin’ to happen.”
“Sure,” said Johnny. “And as far as I’m concerned, the sooner the better.”
“Are you one of them, too?” cried the minister.
“What?” Johnny was surprised.
“Givin’ in? Givin’ up?”
“I didn’t give up, padre. But what do you expect me to do?”
“Fight error and evil!”
“Even unto death? All right, Mr. Sheare, I was a chronic neck-sticker-outer in my day. But what does it accomplish? How does that change anything?”
“It does, it does,” said Mr. Sheare, wringing his hands. “We mustn’t despair, above all we mustn’t despair...” He bent over Johnny, whispering. “Mr. Shinn, there’s no time for talk. They’re confused, they’re poor and sick, and in their extremity they’re plottin’ somethin’ wicked. If you can get out of here and downstairs to warn the others, I’ll stay and try to distract their attention—”
“The door is locked and Burney Hackett’s on the other side, Mr. Sheare.” Johnny squeezed the little man’s hand. “Look. I know this goes down hard with a man like you, padre. There’s one way to lick this — for a while, anyway.”
“How?”
“By pretending we’re won over.”
“Won over?”
“If you and I vote guilty, they’ll be satisfied. That will get Kowalczyk a reprieve—”
Mr. Sheare straightened. “No,” he said coldly. “You’re makin’ fun of me, Mr. Shinn.”
“But I’m not!” Johnny felt anger rising. “Isn’t the object to save Kowalczyk? That may do it. This trial doesn’t mean anything, Mr. Sheare. The whole thing is a ruse — was from the beginning! It’s not the real thing.”
“Who knows,” asked Mr. Sheare oddly, “what’s the real thing and what’s not? I won’t, I can’t, do what I know to be wrong, Mr. Shinn. Nor can you.”
“You think so?” Johnny smiled with violence. “A man can do anything. I’ve seen good Joes, firstclass soldiers, pining away for their loved ones, staunch patriots, faithful churchgoers, who were made to deny and betray their buddies, their wives, their children, their country, their God — every last thing they believed in. They didn’t want to do it, Mr. Sheare, but they did.”
“And you’ve also seen men who did not,” cried the minister scornfully, “but you choose not to remember those! Mr. Shinn, if you don’t stand up now and do what you can, you’re worse than Hube Hemus and Mert Isbel and Peter Berry — you’re worse than the lot of ’em put together! Wrong as they are, they’re at least doin’ what they’re doin’ ’cause they believe in it. But the man who knows what’s right and won’t stick by it — he’s a lost man, Mr. Shinn, and the world’s lost with him.”
Samuel Sheare darted to the door. The key was in the lock. He turned it with trembling fingers and yanked the door open. Constable Hackett faced about.
“Reached a verdict?” he yawned. “’Bout time.”
Mr. Sheare dashed by him. But before the minister could take two steps in the hall, Hube Hemus was upon him.
“No, Mr. Sheare,” Hemus panted. “No.”