Free Time Will Darken It by William Maxwell Page A

specified. A rail fence of four lengths was often seen on the prairie, with the enclosed ground spaded over and sown with wheat. This gave the settler the right to hold his land against all others until he had purchased it from the Government (or until, through some unfortunate clerical mistake, someone else had) and it also left a chaos of overlapping claims. Laws were passed but they were full of loopholes, and consequently for the next two generations able lawyers were held in the highest respect. In the eyes of simple and uneducated men, the Law assumed the status, dignity, and mystical content of a religion. The local lawyers, even though they were the heirs of Moses, sometimes charged very high fees. A farmer accused of having improper relations with his daughter would have to hand over his farm to the Honourable Stephen A. Finch before that eminentswayer of juries would take his case. But the older lawyers also took on a great many cases where there was no possibility of remuneration, merely so they could argue in court. They were dramatic figures and people attended their trials as they would a play, for the emotional excitement, the spectacle, the glimpses of truth behind the barn-burning, the murderous assault, the boundary dispute, or the question of right of way.
    By 1912, the older generation, the great legal actors with their overblown rhetoric, their long white hair and leonine heads, their tricks in cross-examination, their departures from good taste, had one after another died or lapsed into the frailty of old men. There was also, throughout the country, an abrupt change in the legal profession. The older Illinois lawyers were trained on and continued to read assiduously certain books. Their bible was Chitty’s
Pleadings
, which Abraham Lincoln carried in his saddlebags when he went on circuit in the forties and fifties; they also read Blackstone’s
Commentaries
, Kent’s
Commentaries
, and Starkie on
Evidence
. The broad abstract principles set forth in these books were applied to any single stolen will or perjured testimony, and on these principles, the issue was decided. With the establishment of the Harvard Law School case system, the attention of lawyers generally was directed away from statements of principle and towards the facts in the particular case. They preferred more and more to argue before a judge, to let the court decide on the basis of legal precedent, to keep the case away from a jury, and to close the doors of the theatre on the audience who hoped to hear about the murder of Agamemnon and see Medea’s chariot drawn by dragons. The result was that the Law lost much of its moral and philosophic dignity, and required a different talent of those who practised it. The younger men regarded themselves as businessmen, and Miss Ewing (never quite respectful, never openly disrespectful) considered them one and all as schoolboys slip-slopping around in the shoes of giants.
    Through the old-fashioned oratory in Mr. Holby’s office she heard the measured tread which meant that Austin King was walking the floor. So far as Miss Ewing could see, it was the only trait that he had inherited from his father. More times than she could remember she had heard Judge King pacing the length and breadth of his inner office. At such times he did not suffer himself to be interrupted. The governor of the State had been kept waiting for forty-five minutes until the pacing stopped.
    When she had finished typing the abstract, she arranged all five copies neatly in a pile, got up from her desk, and took them into Austin’s office. He stopped pacing and looked at her, but the expression in his eyes was remote, and she was not at all sure that he knew she was in the room.
    “Mrs. Jouette called,” she said. “I made an appointment for her to see you at ten o’clock on Tuesday.”
    The thread of his thought broken, he nodded and (judging by the shade of annoyance in his voice) sufficiently aware of her presence,