When, however, he found the brown subpoena at his office directing him to present himself for service the following Monday he simply gave a half sigh, half grunt of disgust, and let the longed-for vacation go; for one of his pet theories was that the jury system was the chief bulwark of the Constitution, the cornerstone of liberty. Had he only been disingenuous enough he need never have served on any jury, for no lawyer for the defense hearing him enlarge on what he considered the duties of a juryman to be, would ever have allowed him in the box. But when other chaps on the panel presented their excuses to the judge and managed to persuade him of the imperative needs of family or business, and slipped--grinning discreetly--out of the court room, he merely inaudibly called them welshers and pikers. No, he regarded jury service as a duty and a privilege, one not to be lightly avoided--the one common garden governmental function in which Uncle Sam expected every citizen to do his duty.
"I won't let any of the rogues get by me!" he shouted gaily to his wife over the back of the motor. "And anyhow I shan't be locked up all night. There aren't any murder cases on the calendar. I'll be out on the five-fifteen as usual."
Alas, poor Bently! Alas for human frailty and all those splendid visions in which he pictured himself as the anchor of the ship of justice, a prop and stay of the structure of democracy.
His train was a trifle late and the roll of the jury had already been called, and the perennial excuses heard, when he entered the court room; but the clerk, who knew him, nodded in a welcoming manner, checked him off as present and dropped his name card in the revolving wheel. It was a well-known scene to Bently, a veteran of fifteen years' service. Even the actors were familiar friends--the pink-faced judge with his snow-white whiskers, who at times suggested to Bently an octogenarian angel, and, at others, a certain ancient baboon once observed in the Primates cage at the Bronz Zoo; the harried, anxious little clerk with his paradoxically grandiloquent intonation; the comedy assistant district attorney with his wheezy voice emanating from a Falstaffian body, who suffered from a soporific malady and was accustomed to open a case and then let it take care of itself while he slumbered audibly beneath the dais; even Ephraim Tutt, the gaunt, benignly whimsical-looking attorney, in his rusty-black frock coat and loose-hanging tie; his rotund partner, whose birdlike briskness and fat paunch inevitably brought to mind a distended robin in specs; and the _dégagé_ Bonnie Doon in his cut-in-at-the-waist checked suit--he knew them all of old.