Go Set a Watchman - Lee Harper (мир книг txt) 📗

A diploma meant more to Henry than to most of his friends. It was all right for some of them to be expelled; in a pinch, they could go off to a boarding school.

“You cut him to the quick, you know,” said Jem. “It’d be just like him to expel you two weeks before you graduate.”

“So let me,” said Jean Louise. “I’d just love being expelled.” She would. School bored her intolerably.

“That’s not the point, Scout. You simply can’t do it. I could explain—no I couldn’t, either,” said Henry, as the ramifications of his impetuosity sank in. “I couldn’t explain anything.”

“All right,” said Jem. “The situation is this. Hank, I think he’s bluffing, but there’s a good chance he isn’t. You know he prowls around. He might have heard you all, you were practically under his office window—”

“But his office was dark,” said Jean Louise.

“—he loves to sit in the dark. If Scout tells him it’ll be rugged, but if you tell him he’ll expel you sure as you were born, and you’ve got to graduate, son.”

“Jem,” said Jean Louise. “It’s lovely to be a philosopher, but we ain’t getting anywhere—”

“Your status as I see it, Hank,” said Jem, tranquilly ignoring his sister, “is you’ll be damned if you do and damned if you don’t.”

“I—”

“Oh shut up, Scout!” said Henry viciously. “Don’t you see I’ll never be able to hold up my head again if I let you do it?”

“Cu-u-rr, I never saw such heroes!”

Henry jumped up. “Wait a minute!” he shouted. “Jem, give me the car keys and cover for me in study hall. I’ll be back for econ.”

Jem said, “Miss Muffett’ll hear you leaving, Hank.”

“No he won’t. I’ll push the car to the road. Besides, he’ll be in study hall.”

It was easy to be absent from a study hall Mr. Tuffett guarded. He took little personal interest in his students, knowing only the more uninhibited by name. Seats were assigned in the library, but if one made clear one’s desire not to attend, the ranks closed; the person on the end of one’s row set the remaining chair in the hall outside and replaced it when the period was over.

Jean Louise paid no attention to her English teacher, and fifty anxious minutes later was stopped by Henry on the way to her civics class.

“Now listen,” he said tersely. “Do exactly as I tell you: you’re gonna tell him. Write—” he handed her a pencil and she opened her notebook.

“Write, ‘Dear Mr. Tuffett. They look like mine.’ Sign your full name. Better copy it over in ink so he’ll believe it. Now just before noon you go and give it to him. Got it?”

She nodded. “Just before noon.”

When she went to civics she knew it was out. Groups of students were clustered in the hall mumbling and laughing. She endured grins and friendly winks with equanimity—they almost made her feel better. It’s grown people who always believe the worst, she thought, confident that her contemporaries believed no more nor less than what Jem and Hank had circulated. But why did they tell it? They’d be kidded forever: they wouldn’t care because they were graduating, but she would have to sit there for three more years. No, Miss Muffett would expel her and Atticus would send her off somewhere. Atticus would hit the ceiling when Miss Muffett told him the gory story. Oh well, it’d get Hank out of a mess. He and Jem were awfully gallant for a while but she was right in the end. It was the only thing to do.

She wrote out her confession in ink, and as noon drew near, her spirits flagged. Normally there was nothing she enjoyed more than a row with Miss Muffett, who was so thick one could say almost anything to him provided one was careful to maintain a grave and sorrowful countenance, but today she had no taste for dialectics. She felt nervous and she despised herself for it.

She was faintly queasy when she walked down the hall to his office. He had called it obscene and depraved in assembly; what would he say to the town? Maycomb thrived on rumors, there would be all kinds of stories getting back to Atticus—

Mr. Tuffett was sitting behind his desk, gazing testily at its top. “What do you want?” he said, without looking up.

“I wanted to give you this, sir,” she said, backing away instinctively.

Mr. Tuffett took her note, wadded it up without reading it, and threw it at the wastepaper basket.

Jean Louise had the sensation of being floored by a feather.

“Ah, Mr. Tuffett,” she said. “I came to tell you like you said. I—I got ’em at Ginsberg’s,” she added gratuitously. “I didn’t mean any—”

Mr. Tuffett looked up, his face reddening with anger. “Don’t you stand there and tell me what you didn’t mean! Never in my experience have I come across—”

Now she was in for it.

But as she listened she received the impression that Mr. Tuffett’s were general remarks directed more to the student body than to her, they were an echo of his early morning feelings. He was concluding with a precis on the unhealthy attitudes engendered by Maycomb County when she interrupted:

“Mr. Tuffett, I just want to say everybody’s not to blame for what I did—you don’t have to take it out on everybody.”

Mr. Tuffett gripped the edge of his desk and said between clenched teeth, “For that bit of impudence you may remain one hour after school, young lady!”

She took a deep breath. “Mr. Tuffett,” she said, “I think there’s been a mistake. I really don’t quite—”

“You don’t, do you? Then I’ll show you!”

Mr. Tuffett snatched up a thick pile of loose-leaf notebook paper and waved it at her.

“You, Miss, are the hundred and fifth!”

Jean Louise examined the sheets of paper. They were all alike. On each was written “Dear Mr. Tuffett. They look like mine,” and signed by every girl in the school from the ninth grade upward.

She stood for a moment in deep thought; unable to think of anything to say to help Mr. Tuffett, she stole quietly out of his office.

“He’s a beaten man,” said Jem, when they were riding home to dinner. Jean Louise sat between her brother and Henry, who had listened soberly to her account of Mr. Tuffett’s state of mind.

“Hank, you are an absolute genius,” she said. “What ever gave you the idea?”

Henry inhaled deeply on his cigarette and flicked it out the window. “I consulted my lawyer,” he said grandly.

Jean Louise put her hands to her mouth.

“Naturally,” said Henry. “You know he’s been looking after my business since I was knee-high, so I just went to town and explained it to him. I simply asked him for advice.”

“Did Atticus put you up to it?” asked Jean Louise in awe.

“No, he didn’t put me up to it. It was my own idea. He balked around for a while, said it was all a question of balancin’ the equities or something, that I was in an interesting but tenuous position. He swung around in his chair and looked out the window and said he always tried to put himself in his clients’ shoes….” Henry paused.

“Keep on.”

“Well, he said owin’ to the extreme delicacy of my problem, and since there was no evidence of criminal intent, he wouldn’t be above throwin’ a little dust in a juryman’s eyes—whatever that means—and then, oh I don’t know.”

“Oh Hank, you do know.”

“Well, he said something about safety in numbers and if he were me he wouldn’t dream of connivin’ at perjury but so far as he knew all falsies looked alike, and that was about all he could do for me. He said he’d bill me at the end of the month. I wasn’t out of the office good before I got the idea!”

Jean Louise said, “Hank—did he say anything about what he was going to say to me?”

“Say to you?” Henry turned to her. “He won’t say a darn thing to you. He can’t. Don’t you know everything anybody tells his lawyer’s confidential?”

THOCK. SHE FLATTENED the paper cup into the table, shattering their images. The sun stood at two o’clock, as it had stood yesterday and would stand tomorrow.