had taken a chair close to Elizabeth, and he now began making remarks
about nothing, his clean, ruddy face smiling constantly, showing his
perfect teeth, his eyes roving over Elizabeth's figure.
"Well! Well! Well!" he cried. "What grave questions have you two been
deciding this time?"
Elizabeth glanced at Marriott, whose face was drawn, then at Eades, who
sat there in the full propriety of his evening clothes, then at her
mother, seated in what was considered the correct attitude for a lady on
whom her rector had called.
"I think it's good we came, eh, Eades?" the clergyman went on, without
waiting for an answer. "It is not good for you to be too serious, Miss
Elizabeth,--my pastoral calls are meant as much as anything to take
people out of themselves." He laughed again in his abundant
self-satisfaction and reclined comfortably in his chair. And he rolled
his head in his clerical collar, with a smile to show Elizabeth how he
regarded duties that in all propriety must not be considered too
seriously or too sincerely. But Elizabeth did not smile. She met his
eyes calmly.
"Dear me," he said, mocking her gravity. "It must have been serious."
"It was," said Elizabeth soberly. "It was--the murder!"
"The murder! Shocking!" said Modderwell. "I've read something about
it. The newspapers say the identification of Koerner by that poor old
woman was complete and positive; they say the shock was such that she
fainted, and that he stood there all the time and sneered. I hope,
Eades, you will see that the wretch gets his deserts promptly, and send
him to the gallows, where he belongs!"
"Marriott here doesn't join you in that wish, I know," said Eades.
"No? Why not?" asked Modderwell. "Surely he--"
"He's going to defend the murderer." Eades spoke in a tone that had a
sting for Marriott.
"Oh!" said Modderwell rather coldly. "I don't see how you can do such a
thing, Marriott. For your own sake, as much as anybody's, I'm sorry I
can't wish you success."
"I wish he hadn't undertaken the task," said Eades.
"I'm sure it must be most disagreeable," said Mrs. Ward, feeling that
she must say something.
"Why do you wish it?" said Marriott, suddenly turning almost savagely on
Eades.
"Why," said Eades, elevating his brows in a superior way, "I don't like
to see you in such work. A criminal practice is the disreputable part
of the profession."
"But you have a criminal practice."
"Oh, but on the other side!" said Modderwell. "And we all expect so
much better things of Mr. Marriott."
"Oh, don't trouble yourselves about me!" said Marriott. "I'm sure I
prefer my side of the case to Eades's."
The atmosphere was surcharged with bitterness. Mrs. Ward gave a sidelong
glance of pain, deprecating such a _contretemps_.
"And I'm going to try to save him," Marriott was forging on.
"Well," said Eades, looking down on his large oval polished nails, and
speaking in a tone that would finally dispose of the problem, "for my
part, I revere the law and I want to see it enforced."
"Exactly!" Modderwell agreed. "And if there were fewer delays in
bringing these criminals to justice, there would be fewer lynchings and
more respect for the law."
Marriott did not even try to conceal the disgust with which he received
this hackneyed and conventional formula of thoughtless respectability.
He felt that it was useless to argue with Eades or Modderwell; it seemed
to him that they had never thought seriously of such questions, and
would not do so, but that they were merely echoing speeches they had
heard all their lives, inherited speeches that had been in vogue for
generations, ages, one might say.
"I am sure it must be a most disagreeable task," Mrs. Ward was saying,
looking at her daughter in the hope that Elizabeth might relieve a
situation with which she felt herself powerless to deal. Marriott
seemed always to be introducing such topics, and she had the distaste of
her class for the real vital questions of life. But Elizabeth was
speaking.
"I'm sure that Gordon's task isn't more disagreeable than mine."
"Yours?" Mrs. Ward turned toward her daughter, dreading things even
worse now.
"Yes," replied Elizabeth, looking about in pleasure at the surprise she
had created.
"Why, what problem have you?" asked Modderwell.
"I've been sent for--to come to the prison to see--"
"Not _him_!" said Modderwell.
Eades started suddenly forward.
"No," said Elizabeth calmly, enjoying the situation, "his sister."
"His sister!"
"Yes," she turned to her mother. "You know, dear; Gusta. She's been
arrested."
"Oh!" exclaimed Mrs. Ward. "Elizabeth! The idea! What impertinence!
Who could have brought such an insolent message!" She looked at
Marriott, as did the others.
"The idea!" Mrs. Ward went on. "Why, I had no notion he was _her_
brother. To think of our harboring such people!"
Mrs. Ward stiffened in her chair, with glances from time to time for
Marriott and Elizabeth, in an attitude of chilling and austere social
disapproval; then, as if she had forgotten to claim the reassurance she
felt to be certain, she leaned forward, out of the attitude as it were,
to say:
"Of course you sent the reply her assurance deserved."
"No," said Elizabeth in a bird-like tone, "I didn't. What would you do,
Mr. Eades?"
"Why, of course you could not go to a prison," replied Eades.
"But you could, couldn't you? And you do?"
"Only when necessary."
"But you do, Mr. Modderwell?"
"Only professionally," said Modderwell solemnly, for once remembering
his clerical dignity.
"Oh, professionally!" said Elizabeth with a meaning. "You go
professionally, too, Gordon, don't you? And I--I can't go that way. I
can go only--what shall I say?--humanly? So I suppose I can't go at
all!"
"Certainly not," said Mrs. Ward. "How can you ask such a question?"
She was now too disapproving for words. "I can not consent to your
going at all, so let that end it."
"But, Mr. Modderwell," said Elizabeth, with a smile for her mother, "we
pray, don't we, every Sunday for 'pity upon all prisoners and
captives'?"
"That's entirely different," said Modderwell.
"What does it mean,--'I was in prison and ye visited me'?" She sat with
her hands folded in humility, as if seeking wisdom and instruction.
"That was in another day," said Modderwell. "Society was not organized
then as it is now; it was--all different, of course." Modderwell went
on groping for justification. "If these people are repentant--are
seeking to turn from their wickedness, the church has appointed the
clergy to visit them and give them instruction."
"Then perhaps you'd better go!" Elizabeth's eyes sparkled, and she
looked at Modderwell, who feared a joke or a trap; then at Eades, who
was almost as deeply distressed as Mrs. Ward, and then at Marriott,
whose eyes showed the relish with which he enjoyed the situation.
"I don't think she wishes to see me," said Modderwell, with a
significance that did not have a tribute for Gusta. No one disputed
him, and there was silence, in which Eades looked intently at Elizabeth,
and then, just as he seemed on the point of speaking to her, he turned
to Marriott and said:
"You certainly don't think that a proper place for her to go?"
"Oh," said Marriott, "don't refer to me; I'm out of it. I've been, I
brought the message--it's--it's up to Elizabeth."
"Well," said Eades, turning to Elizabeth, "you surely can't be seriously
considering such a thing. You don't know, of course, what kind of place
that is, or what kind of people you would be going among, or what risks
you would be exposing yourself to."
"There would be no danger, would there?" said Elizabeth in her most
innocent manner. "There would be plenty of policemen at hand, wouldn't
there,--in case of need?"
"Well, I don't think you'd willingly elect to go among policemen," said
Eades.
"Perhaps you three would go with me?" suggested Elizabeth. "I'd be safe
then--all I'd lack would be a physician to make my escort completely
representative of the learned professions."
"The newspaper men would be there," said Eades, "you may be sure of
that, and the publicity--"
At the word "publicity" Mrs. Ward cringed with genuine alarm.
"Do you find publicity so annoying?" asked Elizabeth, smiling on the
three men.
"Elizabeth!" said Mrs. Ward, "I do wish you'd stop this nonsense! It
may seem very amusing to you, but I assure you it is not amusing to me;
I find it very distressing." She looked her distress, and then turned
away in the disgust that was a part of her distress. "It would be
shocking!" she said, when she seemed to them all to have had her say.
"I'm sorry to shock you all," said Elizabeth meekly. "It's very kind of
you, I'm sure, to act as mentors and censors of my conduct. I feel
sufficiently put down; you have helped me to a decision. I have
decided, after hearing your arguments, and out of deference to your
sentiments and opinions, to--"
They all looked up expectantly.
"--to go," she concluded.
She smiled on them all with serenity; and they looked at her with that
blank helplessness that came over them whenever they tried to understand
her.
X
Though Elizabeth, as long as Eades and Modderwell were there, had chosen
to satirize her predicament, and had experienced the pleasure of
shocking them by the decision she reached, she found when they had gone
that night, and she was alone in her room, that it was no decision at
all. The situation presented itself in all seriousness, and she found
that she must deal with it, not in any whimsical spirit, but in sober
earnestness. She found it to be a real problem, incapable of isolation
from those artificialities which were all that made it a problem. She
had found it easy and simple enough, and even proper and respectable to
visit the poor in their homes, but when she contemplated visiting them
in the prisons which seemed made for them alone, and were too often so
much better than their homes, obstacles at once arose. As she more
accurately imagined these obstacles, they became formidable. She sat by
the table in her room, under the reading-lamp that stood among the books
she kept beside her, and determined to think it out. She made elaborate
preparations, deciding to marshal all the arguments and then make
deductions and comparisons, and thus, by a process almost mathematical,
determine what to do. But she never got beyond the preparations; her
mind worked, after all, intuitively, she felt rather than thought; she
imagined herself, in the morning, going to the police station,
confronting the officers, finally, perhaps, seeing Gusta. She saw
clearly what her family, her friends, her set, the people she knew,
would say--how horrified they would be, how they would judge and condemn
her. Her mother, Eades and Modderwell accurately represented the world
she knew. And the newspapers, in their eagerness for every detail
touching the tragedy, however remotely, would publish the fact! "This
morning Miss Elizabeth Ward, daughter of Stephen Ward, the broker,
called on the Koerner girl. Fashionably dressed--" She could already
see the cold black types! It was impossible, unheard of. Gusta had no
right--ah, Gusta! She saw the girl's face, pretty as ever, but sad now,
and stained by tears, pleading for human companionship and sympathy.
She remembered how Gusta had served her almost slavishly, how she had
sat up at night for her, and helped her at her toilet, sending delicious
little thrills through her by the magnetic touch of her soft fingers.
If she should send for Gusta, how quickly she would come, though she had
to crawl!
And what, after all, was it that made it hard? What had decreed that
she, one girl, should not go to see another girl who was in trouble?
Such a natural human action was dictated by the ethics and by the
religion of her kind and by all the teachings of her church, and yet,
when it was proposed to practise these precepts, she found them treated
cynically, as if they were of no worth or meaning. That very evening
the representatives of the law and of theology had urged against it!
At breakfast her mother sat at table with her. Mrs. Ward had breakfasted
an hour earlier with her husband, but she had a kindly way of following
the members of her family one after another to the table, and of
entertaining them while they ate. She had told her husband of
Elizabeth's contemplated visit to the prison, and then had decided to
say nothing of it to Elizabeth, in the hope that the whim would have
passed with the night. But Mrs. Ward could not long keep anything in
her heart, and she was presently saying:
"I hope, dear, that you have given up that notion of going to see Gusta.
I hope," she quickly added, putting it in the way she wished she had put
it at first, "that you see your duty more clearly this morning."
"No," said Elizabeth, idly tilting a china cup in her fingers, and
allowing the light that came through the tall, broad windows to fill it
with the golden luminosity of the sun, "I don't see it clearly at all.
I wish I did."
"Don't you think, dear, that you allow yourself to grow morbid,
pondering over your duty so much?"
"I don't think I'm morbid." She would as readily have admitted that she
was superstitious as that she was morbid.
"You have--what kind of conscience was it that Mr. Parrish was talking
about the other night?" Mrs. Ward knitted the brows that life had
marked so lightly.
"New England, I suppose," Elizabeth answered wearily. "But I have no
New England conscience, mama. I have very little conscience at all, and
as for my duty, I almost never do it. I am perfectly aware that if I
did my duty I should lead an entirely different life; but I don't; I go
on weakly, day after day, year after year, leading a perfectly useless
existence, surrounded by wholly artificial duties, and now these same
artificial duties keep me from performing my real duty--which, just now,
seems to me to go and see poor little Gusta."
Mrs. Ward was more disturbed, now that her daughter saw her duty, than
she had been a moment before, when she had declared she could not see
it.
"I do wish you could be like other girls," she said, speaking her
thought as her habit was.
"I am," said Elizabeth, "am I not?"
"Well," Mrs. Ward qualified.
"In all except one thing."
Mrs. Ward looked her question.
"I'm not getting married very fast."
"No," said Mrs. Ward.
Elizabeth laughed for the first time that morning.
"You dear little mother, I really believe you're anxious to get rid of
me!"
"Why, Elizabeth!" said Mrs. Ward, lifting her eyes and then lowering
them suddenly, in her reproach. "How can you say such a thing!"
"But never mind," Elizabeth went on:
"'If no one ever marries me I sha'n't mind very much;
I shall buy a squirrel in a cage and a little rabbit hutch.
I shall have a cottage in a wood, and a pony all my own,
And a little lamb quite clean and tame that I can take to town.
And when I'm getting really old--at twenty-eight or nine--
I shall buy a little orphan girl and bring her up as mine."
She smiled as she finished her quotation, and then suddenly sobered as
she said:
"I'm twenty-seven already!"
"Who wrote that?" asked Mrs. Ward.
"Alma-Tadema."
"Oh! I thought Mr. Marriott might have done it. It's certainly very
silly."
Nora had brought her breakfast, and the action recalled Gusta to
Elizabeth.
"What did papa say--about my going to the prison?"
"He said," Mrs. Ward began gladly, "that, of course, we all felt very
sorry for Gusta, but that you couldn't go _there_. He said it would be
absurd; that you don't understand." Mrs. Ward was silent for a moment,
knowing how much greater the father's influence was than her own. She
was glad that Elizabeth seemed altogether docile and practicable this
morning.
"There's a good girl now," Mrs. Ward added in the hope of pressing her
advantage home.
Elizabeth gave a little start of irritability.
"I wish you wouldn't talk to me in that way, mama. I'm not a child."
"But surely your father knows best, dear," the mother insisted, "more
than--we do."
"Not necessarily," said Elizabeth.
"Why! How can you say so!" exclaimed Mrs. Ward, who bowed to all
authority as a part of her religion.
"Papa takes merely the conventional view," Elizabeth went on, "and the
conventional view is taken without thought."
"But--surely--" Mrs. Ward stammered, in the impotence of one who, easily
convinced without reasons, has no reasons at command--"surely--you heard
what Mr. Modderwell and Mr. Eades said."
"Their view is conventional," said Elizabeth, "and proper." She gave a
little curl of her lip as she spoke this last word.
"Well, I'm sure, dear, that we all wish to be proper, and Mr. Modderwell
and Mr. Eades--"
"Oh! Don't quote those two men to me! Two such prigs, such Pharisees,
I never saw!"
Mrs. Ward looked at her daughter in a new horror. "Why, Elizabeth! I'm
surprised--I thought that Mr. Eades especially--"
"Well, don't you think Mr. Eades especially at all! He's not especially;
he thinks he is, no doubt, and so does everybody else, but they have no
right to, and hereafter Mr. Eades can't come here--that's all!" Her
eyes were flashing.
Mrs. Ward ventured no further just then, but presently resumed:
"Think what people would say!"
"Oh, mother! Please don't use that argument. I have often told you
that I don't care at all what people say."
"I only wish you cared more." She looked at Elizabeth helplessly a
moment and then broke out with what she had been tempted all along to
say.
"It's that Gordon Marriott! That's what it is! He has such strange,
wild notions. He defends these criminals, it seems. I don't see how he
can approve their actions the way he does."
"Why, mother!" said Elizabeth. "How you talk! You might think I was a
little child with no mind of my own. And besides, Gordon does not
approve of their actions, he disapproves of their actions, but he
recognizes them as people, as human beings, just like us--"
"Just like us!" exclaimed Mrs. Ward, withdrawing herself wholly from any
contact with the mere suggestion. "Just like us, indeed! Well, I'd
have him know they're not like us, at all!"
Elizabeth saw how hopeless it was to try to make her mother understand
Marriott's attitude, especially when she found it difficult to
understand it herself.
"Just like us, indeed!" Mrs. Ward repeated. "You are certainly the most
astonishing girl."
"What's the excitement?"
It was Dick, just entering the room. He was clean-shaved, and glowing
from his plunge, his face ruddy and his eyes bright. He was
good-humored that morning, for he had had nearly five hours of sleep.
His mother poured his coffee and he began eating his breakfast.
"What's the matter, Bess?" he asked, seizing the paper his father had
laid aside, and glancing at it in a man's ability to read and converse
with women at the same time.
"Why, she threatens to go to the jail," Mrs. Ward hastened to reply, in
her eagerness for a partizan in her cause. "And her father and Mr.
Modderwell and Mr. Eades have all advised her that it would be
improper--to say nothing of my own wishes in the matter."
Dick, to his mother's disappointment, only laughed.
"What do you want to go there for? Some of your friends been run in?"
"Yes," said Elizabeth calmly.
"That's too bad! Why don't you have Eades let 'em out,--you certainly
have a swell pull with him."
"You have just had Mr. Eades's opinion from mama."
"Who is your friend?"
"Gusta."
Dick's face was suddenly swept with scarlet, and he started--looked up,
then hastily raised his coffee-cup, drained its last drop, flung his
napkin on his plate, and said:
"Oh, that girl that used to work for us?"
"Yes."
"Well, mother's right."
Mrs. Ward looked her gratitude.
"Of course, you can't go."
"I can't?"
He had risen from the table, and Elizabeth's tone impressed him.
"Look here," he said peremptorily. "You just can't go there, that's all
there is about it!"
"Why not?"
"Because you can't. It wouldn't do, it wouldn't be the thing; you ought
to know that."
"But why?" Elizabeth persisted. "I want a reason."
"You don't mean to say you seriously consider it?" asked Dick in real
alarm.
"Yes, I do."
Dick suddenly grew excited, his eyes flamed, and he was very red.
"Look here, Bess," he said. "You just can't, that's all."
"Can't I?" she said, and she gave a little laugh. It was not her usual
pleasant laugh.
"No, you can't." He spoke more than insistently, he spoke angrily. He
snatched out his thin gold watch and glanced at it. "I've not got time
to discuss this thing. You just can't go--that's all there is to it."
Elizabeth rose from the table calmly, went out of the room, and Dick,
after a hesitant moment, ran after her.
"Bess! Bess!"
She stopped.
"See here, Bess, you must not go there to see that girl. I'm surprised!
She isn't the sort, you understand! You don't know what you're doing.
Now look here--wait a minute!" He caught her by the arm. "I tell you
it's not the thing, you mustn't!"
He was quite beside himself.
"You seem greatly excited," she said.
He made a great effort, controlled himself, and, still holding her,
began to plead.
"Please don't go, Bess!" he said. "Please don't!"
"But why--_why_?" she insisted.
"Because I say so."
"Humph!"
"Because I ask it. Please don't; do it for me, this once. You'll be
sorry if you do. Please don't go!"
His eyes were full of the plea he was incoherently stammering. He was
greatly moved, greatly agitated.
"Why, Dick," she said, "what is the matter with you? You seem to take
this trifle very much to heart. You seem to have some special interest,
some deep reason. I wish you'd tell me what it is. Why shouldn't I go
to see poor Gusta? She's in trouble--she was always good to me."
There was a sudden strange wild expression in his face, his lips were
slightly parted. The moments were flying, and he must be off.
"Oh, Bess," he said, "for God's sake, don't go!"
He implored her in his look, then snatching out his watch ran to the
hall, seized his hat and top-coat, and went out, flinging on his coat as
he ran, and leaving the door flying wide behind him. Elizabeth stood
looking after him. When she turned, her mother was in the room.
"What can be the matter with Dick?" said Elizabeth. "I never saw him so
excited before. He seemed--" She paused, and bit her lip.
"Well, my dear," said Mrs. Ward calmly, "you see now, I hope, just how
the world regards such a wild action. It was his love and respect for
his sister, of course."
XI
"No, don't say anything more. I've thought it all out; my duty's clear
now, I must go." Elizabeth laid her hand on her father's shoulder, and
though he turned from the great desk at which he sat in his private
office, he hesitated. "Come on."
"That conscience of yours, Bess--" he began, drawing down the lid of his
desk.
"Yes, I know, but I can't help it."
"How did you decide at last to go?" asked Ward, as they walked rapidly
along in the crowded street.
"Well, it tortured me--I couldn't decide. It seemed so
difficult,--every one--mama, our dear Modderwell, Mr. Eades, Dick--he
nearly lost his reason, and he did lose his temper--thought it
impossible. But at last I decided--"
"Yes?"
"--just to go."
Elizabeth gave a little laugh at this not very illuminating explanation.
"I didn't know what the proprieties were," she went on. "Our little
code had not provided rules--what to wear, the chaperonage, and all
that, you know. And then,"--she abandoned her irony,--"I thought of
you."
"As a last resort, eh?" said Ward, looking fondly into her face,
flushing behind her veil in the keen November air. She drew close to
him, put her hand on his arm.
"Yes," she said, "and as a first resort, as a constant, never-failing
resort."
She gave his arm a little squeeze, and he pressed her hand to his side
in silence.
"Do you know where it is?" Elizabeth asked presently.
"Oh, yes, I was there once."
"When?"
"When that boy of mine was arrested--Graves."
"Yes, I remember."
"I wonder," he said after a pause, and he paused again at the question
he seemed to fear--"whatever became of him!"
She had never told him of that day at the charity bureau; she wondered
if she should do so now, but she heard him sigh, and she let it pass.
"Yes," he went on as if she had been privy to his rapid train of
thought, "I suppose such things must be; something must be done with
them, of course. I hope I did right."
At the Central Station they encountered a young policeman, who, when he
saw Ward, evidently recognized him as a man of affairs, for he came
forward with flattering alacrity, touching his helmet in the respect
which authority always has ready for the rich, as perhaps the real
source of its privilege and its strength. The young policeman, with a
smile on his pleasant Irish face, took Ward and Elizabeth in charge.
"I'll take yez to the front office," he said, "and let yez speak to the
inspector himself."
When McFee understood who Ward was, he came out instantly, with an
unofficial readiness to make a difficult experience easy for them; he
implied an instant and delicate recognition of the patronage he saw, or
thought it proper to see, in this visit, and he even expressed a
sympathy for Gusta herself.
"I'm glad you came, Mr. Ward," he said. "We had to hold the poor girl,
of course, for a few days, until we could finish our investigation of
the case. Will you go up--or shall I have her brought down?"
"Oh, we'll go up," said Ward, wondering where that was, and discovering
suddenly in himself the usual morbid desire to look at the inmates of a
prison. The sergeant detailed to conduct them led them up two broad
flights of stairs, and down a long hall, where, at his step, a matron
appeared, with a bunch of keys hanging at her white apron. Elizabeth
went with none of the sensations she had expected. She had been
surprised to find the police station a quiet place, and the policemen
themselves had been very polite, obliging and disinterested. But when
the matron unlocked one of the doors, and stood aside, Elizabeth felt
her breast flutter with fear.
The sergeant stood in the hall, silent and unconcerned, and when the
matron asked him if he would be present at the interview he shook his
head in a way that indicated the occasion as one of those when rules and
regulations may be suspended. Ward, though he would have liked to go
in, elected to remain outside with the sergeant, and as he did this he
smiled reassuringly at Elizabeth, just then hesitating on the threshold.
"Oh, just step right in," said the matron, standing politely aside. And
Elizabeth drew a deep breath and took the step.
She entered a small vestibule formed of high partitions of flanged
boards that were painted drab; and she waited another moment, with its
gathering anxiety and apprehension, for the matron to unlock a second
door. The door opened with a whine and there, at the other end of the
room in the morning light that struggled through the dirty glass of the
grated window, she saw Gusta. The girl sat on a common wooden chair
that had once been yellow, her hat on, her hands gloved and folded in
her lap, as if in another instant she were to leave the room she somehow
had an air of refusing to identify herself with.
"She's sat that way ever since she came," the matron whispered. "She
hasn't slep' a wink, nor e't a mouthful."
[Illustration: "She's sat that way ever since she came"]
Elizabeth's glance swept the room which was Gusta's prison, its walls
lined higher than her head with sheet-iron; on one side a narrow cot,
frowsy, filthy, that looked as if it were never made, though the dirty
pillow told how many persons had slept in it--or tried to sleep in it.
There was a wooden table, with a battered tin cup, a few crusts and
crumbs of rye bread, and cockroaches that raced energetically about,
pausing now and then to wave their inquisitive antennae, and, besides, a
cheap, small edition of the Bible, adding with a kind of brutal mockery
the final touch of squalor to the room.
Gusta moved, looked up, made sure, and then suddenly rose and came
toward her.
"I knew you'd come, Miss Elizabeth," the girl said, with a relief that
compromised the certainty she had just expressed.
"I came as soon as I could, Gusta," said Elizabeth, with an amused
conjecture as to what Gusta might think had the girl known what
difficulties she had had in getting there at all.
"Yes," said Gusta, "thank you, I--"
She blushed to her throat. They stood there in the middle of that
common prison; a sudden constraint lay on them. Elizabeth, conscious of
the difficulty of the whole situation, and with a little palpitating
fear at being in a prison at all--a haunting apprehension of some
mistake, some oversight, some sudden slip or sliding of a bolt--did not
know what to say to Gusta now that she was there. She felt helpless,
there was not even a chair to sit in; she shuddered at the thought of
contact with any of the mean articles of furniture, and stood rigidly in
the middle of the room. She looked at Gusta closely; already, of
course, with her feminine instinct, she had taken in Gusta's dress--the
clothes that she instantly recognized as being better than Gusta had
ever before worn--a hat heavy with plumes, a tan coat, long and of that
extreme mode which foretold its early passing from the fashion, the
high-heeled boots. Her coat was open and revealed a thin bodice with a
lace yoke, and a chain of some sort. An odor of perfume enveloped her.
The whole costume was distasteful to Elizabeth, it was something too
much, and had an indefinable quality of tawdriness that was hard to
confirm, until she saw in it, somehow, the first signs of moral
disintegration. And this showed in Gusta's face, fuller--as was her
whole figure--than Elizabeth remembered it, and in a certain coarseness
of expression that had scarcely as yet gone the length of fixing itself
in lines. Elizabeth felt something that she recoiled from, and her
attitude stiffened imperceptibly. But not imperceptibly to Gusta, who
was a woman, too, and had an instant sense of the woman in Elizabeth
shrinking from what the woman in her no longer had to protect itself
with, and she felt the woman's rush of anger and rebellion in such a
relation. But then, she softened, and looked up with big tears. She
had a sudden yearning to fling herself on Elizabeth's breast, but leave
was wanting, and then, almost desperately, for she must assert her
sisterhood, must touch and cling to her, she seized Elizabeth's hand and
held it.
"Oh, Miss Elizabeth," she said, "I oughtn't to 'av' sent for you. I
know I had no right; but you was always good to me, and I had no one.
I've done nothing. I've done nothing, honest, honest, Miss Elizabeth,
I've done nothing. I don't know what I'm here for at all; they won't
tell me. And Archie, too, it must have something to do with him, but
he's innocent, too. He hasn't done nothing either. Won't you believe
me? Oh, say you will!"
She still clung to Elizabeth's hand, and now she pressed it in both her
own, and raised it, and came closer, and looked into Elizabeth's face.
"Say you believe me!" she insisted, and Elizabeth, half in fear, as
though to pacify a maniac, nodded.
"Of course, of course, Gusta."
"You mean it?"
"Surely I do."
"And you know I'm just as good as I ever was, don't you?"
"Why--of course, I do, Gusta." It is so hard to lie; the truth, in its
divine persistence, springs so incautiously to the eyes before it can be
checked at the lips.
The tears dried suddenly in Gusta's blue eyes. She spoke fiercely.
"You don't mean it! No, you don't mean it! I see you don't--you
needn't say you do! Oh, you needn't say you do!"
She squeezed Elizabeth's hand almost maliciously and Elizabeth winced
with pain.
"You--you don't know!" Gusta went on. And then she hesitated, seemed to
deliberate on the verge of a certain desperation, to pause for an
instant before a temptation to which she longed to yield.
"I could tell you something," she said significantly.
A wonder gathered in Elizabeth's eyes. Her heart was beating rapidly,
she could feel it throbbing.
"Do you know why I sent for you--what I had to tell you?"
She was looking directly in Elizabeth's eyes; the faces of both girls
became pale. And Elizabeth groped in her startled mind for some clear
recognition, some postulation of a fact, a horrible, blasting certitude
that was beginning to formulate itself, a certitude that would have
swept away in an instant all those formal barriers that had stood in the
way of her coming to this haggard prison. She shuddered, and closed her
mind, as she closed her eyes just then, to shut out the look in the eyes
of this imprisoned girl.
But the moment was too tense to last. Some mercy was in the breast of
the girl to whom life had shown so little mercy. Voluntarily, she
released Elizabeth, and put up her hands to her face, and shook with
sobs.
"Don't, don't, Gusta," Elizabeth pleaded, "don't cry, dear."
The endearment made Gusta cry the harder. And then Elizabeth, who had
shrunk from her and from everything in the room, put her arms about her,
and supported her, and patted her shoulder and repeated:
"There, dear, there, you mustn't cry."
And then presently:
"Tell me what I can do to help you. I want to help you."
Gusta sobbed a moment longer.
"Nothing, there is nothing," she said. "I just wanted you. I wanted
some one--"
"Yes, I understand," said Elizabeth. She did understand many things now
that made life clearer, if sadder.
"I wanted you to tell my poor old mother," said Gusta. "That's
all--that's what I had to tell you."
She said it so unconvincingly, and looked up suddenly with a wan smile
that begged forgiveness, and then Elizabeth did what a while before
would have been impossible--she kissed the girl's cheek. And Gusta
cuddled close to her in a peace that almost purred, and was contented.
Gusta was held for a week; then released.
XII
Archie was looking well that Monday morning in January on which his
trial was to begin. He had slept soundly in his canvas hammock; not
even the whimpering of Reinhart, the young sneak thief whom every one in
the jail detested, nor the strange noises and startled outcries he made
in his sleep--when he did sleep--had disturbed him. The night before,
Utter had allowed Archie a bath, though he had broken a rule in doing
so, and that morning Archie had borrowed a whisk from Utter, brushed his
old clothes industriously, and then he had put on the underwear his
mother had washed and patched and mended, and the shirt of blue and
white stripes Marriott had provided. Then with scrupulous care he set
his cell in order, arranged his few things on the little table--the deck
of cards, the yellow-covered dog's-eared novel and a broken comb.
Beside these, lay his fresh collar and his beloved blue cravat with the
white polka dots; his coat and waistcoat hung over the back of his
chair. At seven o'clock Willie Kirkpatrick, alias "Toughie," a boy who,
after two terms in the Reform School, was now going to the Intermediate
Prison, had brought in the bread and coffee. At eight o'clock Archie
was turned into the corridor, and with him Blanco, the bigamist, whose
two young wives were being held as witnesses in the women's quarter.
Blanco was a barber, and he made himself useful by shaving the other
prisoners. This morning, with scissors, razor, lather-brush and cup, he
took especial pains with Archie. Now and then he paused, cocked his
little head with its plume of black hair, and surveyed his handiwork
with honest pride.
"I'll fix you up swell, Dutch, so's they'll have to acquit you."
From the cells came laughter. The prisoners began to josh Blanco--it
was one of their few pastimes.
"Don't stand for one of them gilly hair-cuts, Dutch," cried Billy Whee,
a porch-climber. "It'll be a fritzer, sure."
"Yes, he'll make your knob look like a mop."
"When I was doing my bit at the Pork Dump," began O'Grady, in the tone
that portends a story; the cell doors began to rattle.
"Cheese it," cried the voices. They had grown tired of O'Grady's
boasting.
After Archie had returned to his cell, an English thief whom they called
the Duke, began to sing in a clear tenor voice, to the tune of _Dixie_:
"I wish there were no prisons,
I do, I does--'cause why?--
This old treadmill makes me feel ill,
I only pinch my belly for to fill,
Wi' me 'ands,
Wi' me dukes,
Wi' me clawrs,
Me mud hooks."
Archie scowled; he wished, for once, the Duke would keep still. He was
trying to think, trying to assure himself that his trial would turn out
well. Day after day, Marriott had come, and for hours he and Archie had
sat in the long gray corridor, in the dry atmosphere of the overheated
jail, conferring in whispers, because Archie knew Danner was listening
at the peep-hole in the wall. Marriott was perplexed; how could he get
Archie's true story before the jury? He had even consulted Elizabeth,
told her the story.
"Oh, horrible!" she exclaimed. "But surely, you can tell the
jury--surely they will sympathize."
He had shaken his head.
"Why not?"
"Because," said Marriott, "the rules of evidence are designed to keep
out the truth."
"But can't Archie tell it?"
"I don't dare to let him take the stand."
"Why?"
"Because he'll be convicted if he does."
"And if he doesn't?"
"The same result--he'll be convicted. He's convicted now--the mob has
already done that; the trial is only a conventional formality."
"What mob?"
"The newspapers, the preachers, the great moral, respectable mob that
holds a man guilty until he proves himself innocent, and, if he asserts
his innocence, looks even on that as a proof of his guilt."
Eades had announced that Archie would be tried for the murder of Kouka,
and Elizabeth had been impressed.
"Wasn't that rather fine in him?" she asked.
"Yes," said Marriott, "and very clever."
"Clever?"
"He means to try him for the murder of Kouka, and convict him of the
murder of Margaret Flanagan."
This morning then, Archie awaited the hour of his trial. The night
before he had played solitaire, trying to read his fate in the fall of
the fickle cards. The first game he had lost; then he decided that he
was entitled to two out of three chances. He played again, and lost.
Then he decided to play another--best three out of five--he might win
the other two. He played and won the third game. He lost the fourth.
And now he stood and waited. At half-past eight he drew on his
waistcoat and his coat, giving them a final brushing. The Duke was
singing again:
"An' I wish there were no bobbies,
I do, I does--'cause why?--
This oakum pickin' gives me such a lickin',
But still I likes to do a bit o' nickin',
Wi' me 'ands,
Wi' me dukes,
Wi' me clawrs,
Me mud hooks."
The last words of the song were punctuated by the clanging of the bolts.
"Koerner!" called out Danner's voice.
He was throwing the locks of Archie's cell from the big steel box by the
door. Archie sprang to his feet, gave his cravat a final touch, and
adjusted his coat. The steel door went gliding back in its hard grooves.
He stepped out, thence through the other door, and there Danner waited.
Archie held out his right hand, Danner slipped on the handcuff and its
spring clicked. As they went out, cries came from the cells.
"So long, Archie! Good luck to ye!"
"Good luck!" came the chorus.
Archie, standing in the strange light outside the prison, seemed to take
on a changed aspect. He had grown fat during his two months' idleness
in jail; his skin was white and soft. Now in the gray light of the
January morning, his face had lost the ruddy glow Blanco's shaving had
imparted to it, and was pale. The snow lay on the ground, the air was
cold and raw. Archie gasped in the surprise his lungs felt in this
atmosphere, startling in its cold and freshness after the hot air of the
steam-heated jail. He filled his lungs with the air and blew it out
again in frost. A shudder ran through him. Danner was jovial for once.
"Fine day," he said.
Archie did not reply. He hated Danner more than he hated most people,
and he hated every one, almost--save Marriott and Gusta, and his father
and mother and the kids, and Elizabeth, who, as Marriott had reported to
him, wished him well. The air and the light gave him pain--he shrank
from them; he had not been outdoors since that day, a month before, when
he had been taken over with Curly to be arraigned. He looked on the
world again, the world that was so strange and new. Once more there
swept over him that queer sensation that always came as he stepped out
of prison, the sensation of fear, of uncertainty, a doubt of reality,
the blur before his eyes. The streets were deserted, the houses still.
The snow crunched frigidly under his heels. The handcuff chain clicked
in the frost. A wagon turned the corner; the driver walked beside his
steaming horses and flapped his arms about his shoulders; the wheels
whined on the snow. Archie looked at the man; it was strange, he felt,
that a man should be free to walk the streets and flap his arms that
way.
XIII
The court-room was already crowded and buzzed with a pleasant yet
excited hum of voices. Mrs. Koerner, the first to appear that morning,
had been given a seat directly in front of the bailiff's elevated desk,
where she was to sit, a conspicuous figure of sorrow through all the
trial. The twenty-four aged men of the special venire were seated
inside the bar; the reporters were at their table; two policemen,
wearing their heavy overcoats as if they were no discomfort at all, were
gossiping together; Giles, the court stenographer, grown old in
automatic service, wandered about in a thin coat with ragged sleeves,
its shoulders powdered by dandruff. The life that for so many years had
been unfolded to him in a series of dramatic tableaux could have
interested him but little; he seemed, indeed, to have reduced it to mere
symbols--dashes, pothooks, points and outlines. At one of the trial
tables sat Marriott. He was nervous, not having slept well the night
before. At the table with him was Pennell, the young lawyer with the
gift of the gab, who had been so unfortunate as to win the oratorical
prize in college. Pennell, at the last moment, somehow--Marriott never
knew exactly how--had insinuated himself into the case. He explained
his appearance by saying, in his grand, mysterious way, that he had been
engaged by "certain influential friends" of Archie's, who preferred to
remain unknown. Archie, who did not know that he had any influential
friends, could not explain Pennell's presence, but, feeling that the
more lawyers he had the better, he was secretly glad, and Marriott, who
bowed before the whole situation in a kind of helpless fatalism, made no
objection.
But suddenly a change occurred. The atmosphere became electric. Men
started up, their eyes glistened, they leaned forward, a low murmur
arose; the old bailiff started violently, smote his marble slab with his
gavel, and Mark Bentley, very red in the face, was seen striding toward
the door, waving his authoritative hand and calling:
"Back there! Get back, I tell you!"
Archie had just been brought in. Danner led him to the trial table, and
he took his seat, hid his manacled hands, and sat motionless, gazing
straight before him, unconsciously obeying some long-hidden, obscure
instinct of the hunted. But Marriott's hand had found his.
"How did you sleep last night?"
"Pretty well," said Archie as politely as possible, the occasion seeming
to require those conventionalities of which he was so very uncertain.
"Well, we'll soon be at it now," said Marriott, thinking, however, of
his own wretched night.
Archie watched Marriott tumble the papers out of his green bag and
arrange his briefs and memoranda; he did not take his eyes from the
green bag. Whenever he did, they met other eyes that looked at him with
an expression that combined all the lower, brutish impulses--curiosity,
fear and hate.
At half-past nine Glassford, having finished his cigar, entered the
court-room. Directly behind him came Eades. The bailiff, who if he had
been drowsing again, had been drowsing as always, with one eye on
Glassford, now got to his feet, and, as Glassford ascended the bench,
struck the marble slab with the gavel and in the instant stillness,
repeated his worn formula.
"The case of the State _versus_ Archie Koerner," said Glassford, reading
from his docket. He glanced over his gold glasses at Marriott.
"Are you ready for trial, Mr. Marriott?"
"We are ready, your Honor."
Danner unlocked the handcuffs from Archie's wrists. The reporters began
writing feverishly; already messenger boys were coming and going. Gard,
the clerk, was calling the roll of the venire-men, and when he had done,
it was time for the lawyers to begin examining them; but before this
could be done, it was necessary that a formula be repeated to them, and
Gard told them to stand up. As soon as they could comprehend his
meaning, they got to their feet with their various difficulties, and
Gard proceeded:
"'You and each of you do solemnly swear'--hold up your right
hands--'that the answers you are about to give will be the truth, the
whole truth, and nothing but the truth, s'elp you God.'"
And then, in a lower voice, as if the real business were now to begin,
he called:
"William C. McGiffert."
An aged man came forward leaning on a crooked cane, and took the
witness-stand. Eades began his examination by telling McGiffert about
the death of Kouka, and, when he had finished, asked him if he had ever
heard of it, or read of it, or formed or expressed an opinion about it,
if he were related to Koerner, or to Marriott, or to Pennell, or had
ever employed them, or either of them, as attorney. Then he asked
McGiffert if Lamborn or himself had acted as his attorney; finally, with
an air of the utmost fairness, as if he would not for worlds have any
but an entirely unprejudiced jury, he appealed to McGiffert to tell
whether he knew of any reason why he could not give Koerner a fair and
impartial trial and render a verdict according to the law and the
evidence. McGiffert had shaken his head hastily at each one of Eades's
questions. Eades paused impressively, then asked a question that sent a
thrill through the onlookers.
"Mr. McGiffert, have you any conscientious scruples against capital
punishment?"
The suggestive possibility affected men strangely; they leaned forward,
hanging on the reply. McGiffert shook his aged head again as if it were
a gratuitous reflection on his character to hint at his being in any way
unfit for this office.
Eades, having had McGiffert on many juries and knowing that he
invariably voted for conviction, with a graceful gesture of his white
hand, waved him, as it were, to Marriott.
Marriott, after an examination he knew was hopeless from the start,
found no cause for challenge; and after Glassford, as if some deeper
possibilities had occurred to his superior mind, had asked McGiffert
about his age and his health, McGiffert, with the relief of a man who
has passed successfully through an ordeal, climbed hastily into the
jury-box and retreated to its farthest corner, as if it were a safe
place from which he could not be dislodged.
One by one the venire-men were examined; several were excused. One old
man, although he protested, was manifestly deaf, another had employed
Eades, another rose and, hanging over the desk, whispered to Glassford,
who immediately excused him because of physical disability; finally, by
noon, the panel was full.
Marriott scanned the twelve bearded men. Viewed as a whole, they seemed
well to typify the great institution of the English law, centuries old;
their beards clung to them like the gray moss of a live-oak, hoary with
age. But these patriarchal beards could lend little dignity. The old
men sat there suggesting the diseases of age--rheumatism, lumbago,
palsy--death and decay. Their faces were mere masks of clay; they were
lacking in imagination, in humor, in sympathy, in pity, in mercy, all
the high human qualities having long ago died within them, leaving their
bodies untenanted. He knew they were ready at that moment to convict
Archie. He had sixteen peremptory challenges, and as he reflected that
these would soon be exhausted and that the men who were thus excused
would be replaced by others just like them, a despair seized him. But
it was imperative to get rid of these; they were, for the most part,
professional jurors who would invariably vote for the state. He must
begin to use those precious peremptory challenges and compel the court
to issue special venires; in the haste and confusion men might be found
who would be less professional and more intelligent. In this case,
involving, as it did, the Flanagan case, he needed strong, independent
men, whereas Eades required instead weak, subservient and stupid
men--men with crystallized minds, dull, orthodox, inaccessible to ideas.
Furthermore, Marriott recalled that juries are not made up of twelve
men, as the law boasts, but of two or three men, or more often, of one
man stronger than the rest, who dominates his fellows, lays his
masterful will upon them, and bends them to his wishes and his
prejudices. Perhaps, in some special venire, quite by accident, when the
sheriff's deputies began to scour the town, there might be found one
such man, who, for some obscure reason, would incline to Archie's side.
On such a caprice of fate hung Archie's life.
"Mr. Marriott, the court is waiting," said Glassford.
"If your Honor will indulge us a moment." Then Marriott whispered to
Archie.
"Je's," said Archie. "Looks cheesy to me. Looks to me like a lot o'
rummy blokes. They've got it all framed up now. Them old hoosiers
would cop the cush all right." Archie whispered with the sneering
cynicism of one who holds the belief of the all-powerful influence of
money. "That old harp back there in the corner with the green benny on,
he looks like a bull to me. Go after him and knock him off."
Archie had indicated quite openly an aged Irishman who sat huddled in a
faded overcoat in the rear row. He had white chin-whiskers and a long,
broad, clean-shaven upper lip.
"Mr. McGee," said Marriott, rising, "what business are you in?"
"Oi'm retired, sor."
"Were you ever on the police force?"
"Well, sor," said McGee uneasily, "Oi wor wance, sor--yes, sor."
He looked up now with a nonchalant air.
"How long were you on the force?"
"Twinty-wan years, sor."
Marriott questioned him at length, finally challenged him for cause;
Eades objected, they argued, and Glassford overruled the challenge.
Then, having certainly offended McGee, there was nothing for Marriott to
do but to submit a peremptory challenge.
By night the venire was exhausted and Glassford ordered a special
venire. With the serving of the special venires, a difference was
noted; whereas the men on the first venire had studied how they should
qualify themselves for jury service, the men whom Bentley and his
deputies now haled into court, studied how they should disqualify
themselves. They were all impatient of the senseless tedium, of the
costly interruption, being men with real work to do. They replied like
experts; all had read of the case, all had formed and expressed
opinions, and their opinions could not be shaken by any evidence that
might be adduced. Glassford plied them with metaphysical questions; drew
psychological distinctions; but in vain. Many of them had scruples
against capital punishment; a score of them, fifty of them swore to
this, to the delight but disappointment of Marriott, the discomfiture of
Eades, the perplexity of Glassford, and the dull amazement of the men in
the jury-box, who had no conscientious scruples against anything. Still
others had certificates of various kinds exempting them from jury
service, which they exhibited with calm smiles and were excused.
Marriott eked out his precious peremptory challenges for three days;
venire after venire was issued, and Bentley was happy, for all this
meant fees. The crowd diminished. The lawyers grew weary and no longer
exerted themselves to say clever things. The sky, which had sparkled a
cold, frosty blue for days, was overcast with gray clouds, the
atmosphere was saturated with a chill and penetrating moisture. This
atmosphere affected men strangely. Eades and Marriott had a dispute,
Danner ordered Archie to sit erect, Glassford sharply rebuked two
citizens who did not believe in capital punishment for their lack of a
sense of civic duty; then he whirled about in his chair and exclaimed
angrily:
"We'll not adjourn to-night until we have a jury!"
Marriott had one peremptory challenge left, and eleven men had been
accepted. It was now a matter of luck.
"George Holden," called the clerk.
A broad-shouldered man of medium height came promptly forward, took the
oath, leaned back in his chair, crossed his legs, folded his strong
hands in his lap, and raised a pair of deep blue eyes to Eades. As he
sat there, something in the poise of his fine head, with its thick curly
hair, claimed attention; interest revived; every one looked at him. He
had a smooth-shaven face and a wide white brow, and the collar of his
dark flannel shirt was open, freeing his strong neck and ample throat.
Marriott suddenly conceived a liking for the man.
"What is your occupation, Mr. Holden?" asked Eades.
"Machinist."
He had read the newspaper accounts of the murder of Kouka and of the
Flanagan tragedy, but he had not formed any real opinions; he may have
formed impressions, but he could lay them aside; he didn't go much
anyway, he said, on what he read in the newspapers.
The formal questions were put and answered to Eades's satisfaction; then
came the real question:
"Are you opposed to capital punishment?"
"Yes, sir, I am."
"Are your scruples conscientious ones?"
"Yes, sir."
"And not to be overcome?"
"They are not to be overcome."
Just then Glassford, impatient of all these scruples he was hearing so
much about, whirled on Holden with a scowl. Holden turned; his blue
eyes met those of Glassford.
"You don't want to sit on this jury, do you?" demanded Glassford.
"No, sir."
"It would interfere with your business, wouldn't it?"
"No, sir."
"It wouldn't? You earn good wages, don't you?"
"I'm out of a job now, sir."
"Well, are your scruples such that you can't lay them aside long enough
to do your duty as a citizen?"
Holden flushed.
"I can't lay them aside, no; but it doesn't follow that I can't do my
duty as a citizen."
"But," began Glassford in his tone of legal argument, "assuming that the
law as it is should be altered, nevertheless, knowing the law, can you
lay aside your private views and perform a public duty by applying this
law to a given state of facts as the court instructs you?--You
understand me, do you?"
"I understand perfectly, sir."
"Well, what do you say?"
"I have no private views that are not public ones; I can't see any
distinction. I say that I would not take an oath that might oblige me
to vote to kill a man."
The atmosphere became tense.
"But assuming you had taken an oath, would you rather break that oath
than discharge your duty?"
"I wouldn't take such an oath."
"Then you place your private opinions above the law, do you?"
"In this instance, I do. I don't believe in that law, and I won't help
enforce it."
"You mean,"--Glassford was plainly angry--"that you wouldn't take an
oath to enforce a law you didn't believe in?"
"That's just what I mean."
Glassford looked an instant at Holden as if trying to decide what he had
better do with him for these heresies. Holden's blue eyes were steady;
they returned Glassford's gaze, seeming scarcely to wink. And just then
Eades, fearing the effect of the man's scruples on the jury, thought
best to relieve the situation.
"We submit a challenge for cause," he said.
"Allowed," Glassford snapped. "We don't want such men as you on
juries."
He whirled about in his chair, turned his back on Holden, and as Holden
walked directly from the courtroom, the eyes of all followed him, with a
strange interest in a man who was considered unfit for jury service
because he had principles he would not forego.
"Samuel Walker," called Gard.
An aged, doddering man tottered to the chair. He scarcely spoke in
answer to Eades's questions; when he did, it was in the weak, quavering
voice of senility. He had no occupation, knew none of the lawyers, had
no knowledge of the case, had neither formed nor expressed opinions, and
had no scruples against capital punishment.
"You believe that the laws should be executed and upheld?" said Eades in
an insinuating tone.
"Heh?" said the old man, leaning forward with an open palm behind his
hairy ear.
Eades repeated the question and the fellow nodded.
Marriott turned in disgust from this stupid, senile man who was
qualified, as impatiently as Glassford had turned from the intelligent
man who was disqualified. And then, just as Walker was making for the
jury-box, Marriott used his last peremptory challenge.
A moment later he saw his mistake. Gard was calling a name he knew.
"William A. Broadwell."
The short winter afternoon was closing in. For half an hour shadows had
been stealing wearily through the room; the spectators had become a
blurred mass, the jurymen lounging in the box had grown indistinct in
the gloom. For some time, the green shade of the electric lamp on the
clerk's desk had been glowing, but now, as Broadwell came forward, the
old bailiff, shuffling across the floor, suddenly switched on the
electricity, and group by group, cluster by cluster, the bulbs sprang
into light, first in the ceiling, then on the walls, then about the
judge's bench. There was a touch of the theatrical in it, for the
lights seemed to have been switched on to illuminate the entrance of
this important man.
He was sworn and took the witness-chair, which he completely filled, and
clasped his white hands across his round paunch with an air that savored
of piety and unction. The few gray hairs glistening at the sides of his
round bald head gave it a tonsured appearance; fat enfolded his skull,
rounding at his temples, swelling on his clean-shaven, monkish cheeks,
falling in folds like dewlaps over his linen collar. He sat there with
satisfaction, breathing heavily, making no movement, excepting as to his
thin lips which he pursed now and then as if to adjust them more and
more perfectly to what he considered the proper expression of
impeccability. Marriott was utterly sick at heart. For he knew William
A. Broadwell, orthodox, formal, eminently respectable, a server on
committees, a deacon with certain cheap honors of the churchly kind, a
Pharisee of the Pharisees.
In his low solemn voice, pursing his lips nicely after each sentence as
if his own words tasted good to him, Broadwell answered Eades's
questions; he had no opposition to capital punishment, indeed, he added
quite gratuitously, he believed in supporting it; he had great
veneration for the law, and--oh, yes, he had read accounts of the
murder; read them merely because he esteemed it a citizen's duty to be
conversant with affairs of the day, and he had formed opinions as any
intelligent man must necessarily.
"But you could lay aside those opinions and reach a conclusion based
purely on evidence, of course, Mr. Broadwell?"
"Oh, yes, sir," said Broadwell, with an unctuous smile that deprecated
the idea of his being influenced in any but the legitimate way.
"We are thoroughly satisfied with Mr. Broadwell, your Honor," said
Eades.
"One minute, Mr. Broadwell," began Marriott.
Glassford looked at Marriott the surprise he felt at his presumption,
and Marriott felt an opposition in the room. Broadwell shifted
slightly, pursed his lips smugly and looked down on Marriott with his
wise benevolence.
"Mr. Broadwell, you say you read the accounts of the tragedy?"
"Yes."
"Did you read all of them?"
"I believe so."
"Read the report of the evidence given on the preliminary hearing?"
"Yes."
"Read the editorials in the _Courier_?"
"Yes."
"You respect its opinions?"
"I do, yes."
"Your pastor preached a sermon on this case, did he not?"
"He made applications of it in an illustrative way."
"Quite edifying, of course?"
Marriott knew he had made a mistake, but the impulse to have this fling
had been irresistible. Broadwell bowed coldly.
"And all these things influenced you?"
"Yes."
"Exactly. And on them you have formed an opinion respecting the guilt
or innocence of this young man?"
Broadwell cast a hasty sidelong glance at Glassford, as if this had gone
quite far enough, but he said patiently:
"Yes."
"And it would require evidence to remove that opinion?"
"I presume it would."
"You know it would, don't you?"
"Yes."
"We submit a challenge for cause, your Honor," said Marriott.
Glassford turned to Broadwell with an air that told how speedily he
would make an end of this business.
"You have talked with none of the witnesses, Mr. Broadwell?"
"Oh, no, sir," said Broadwell, smiling at the absurdity.
"The accounts you read were not stenographic reports of the evidence?"
"No, sir; abstracts, rather, I should say."
"Exactly. Were the conclusions you came to opinions, or mere
impressions?"
"Mere impressions I should say, your Honor."
"They are not to be dignified by the name of opinions?"
"Hardly, your Honor."
"If they were, you could lay them aside and try this case on its merits,
basing your judgment on the evidence as it is adduced, and on the law as
the court shall declare it to you?"
"Certainly, your Honor."
Glassford turned away.
"If the court," he said, "had any doubts in this matter, they would be
resolved in favor of the defendant, but the court has none. My own
knowledge of Mr. Broadwell and of his standing in the community leads me
to declare that he is the very man for such important service, and the
court feels that we are to be congratulated on having him to assist us
in trying this case. The challenge is overruled. You may take your
seat in the jury-box, Mr. Broadwell."
Glassford consulted his notes; the peremptory challenges were all
exhausted now.
"The jury will rise and be sworn," he said.
Marriott had suffered his first defeat. He looked at the jury. A
change had taken place; these twelve men no longer impressed him as an
institution grown old and gray with the waste of ages. They no longer
held for him any symbolic meaning; little by little, during the long,
tedious hours, individualities had developed, the idea of unity had
receded. Seen thus closely and with increasing familiarity, the formal
disappeared, the man emerged from the mass, and Marriott found himself
face to face with the personal equation. He sat with one arm thrown
over the back of his chair and looked at them, watching, as it were,
this institution disintegrate into men, merely; men without the
inspiration of noble ideals, swayed by primitive impulses, unconsciously
responsive to the obscure and mysterious currents of human feeling then
flowing through the minds of the people, generating and setting in
motion vague, terrible and irresistible powers. He could feel those
strange, occult currents moving in him--he must set himself against them
that he might stand, though all alone, for the ignorant boy whose soul
had strayed so far.
He studied the faces of the twelve men, trying to discover some hope,
some means of moving and winning them. There was old McGiffert, who
alone of all the first venire had withstood the mutations of the last
four days, sitting serene and triumphant, sure of his two dollars a day,
utterly unconscious of the grave and tragic significance of the
responsibilities he had been so anxious to assume. There was Osgood,
the contractor, a long row of cigars, a tooth-brush, and a narrow comb
sticking out of his waistcoat pocket; Duncan, with his short sandy hair
covering sparsely a red scalp that moved curiously when he uttered
certain words; Foley, constantly munching his tobacco, as he had been
doing for sixty years, so that when he spoke he did so with closed lips;
Slade, the man with the rough red face, who found, as Marriott had at
first thought, amusement in everything, for he smiled often, showing his
gums and a row of tiny unclean teeth; there was Grey, constantly moving
his false teeth about in his mouth; Church, with thin gray hair, white
mustache and one large front tooth that pressed into his lower lip; and
then Menard, the grocer's clerk, wearing black clothes that long ago had
passed out of fashion; his sallow, thin, unhealthy face wearing an
expression of fright. Marriott recalled how uncertain Menard had been
in his notions about capital punishment; how, at first, he had said he
was opposed to it, and how at last, under Glassford's metaphysical
distinctions, the boy had declared that he would do his duty. Marriott
had been encouraged, thinking that Menard's natural impulses might
reassert themselves, but now, alas, he recognized that Menard in the
hands of other men would be but the putty he so much resembled. Then
there were Reder, the gray old German, and Chisholm and McCann, the aged
farmers with the unkempt beards, and Broadwell--ah, Broadwell! For it
was Broadwell who held Marriott's gaze at last, as he held his interest;
it was Broadwell, indeed, who was that jury. Naturally stronger than
the rest, his reputation, his pomposity, the character Glassford had
generously given him--all these marked him as the man who would reach
that jury's verdict for it, and then, as foreman, solemnly bear it in.
Marriott looked at him, smug, sleek, overfed, unctuous, his shining bald
head inclined at a meek angle, his little eyes half closed, his
pendulous jowls hiding his collar, and realized that this was the man to
whom he had to try Archie's case, and he would rather have tried the
case to any other man in town. He wished that he had used his
challenges differently; any other twelve of the two hundred men who had
been summoned would have served his purpose better; he had a wild,
impotent regret that he had not allowed the last man to remain before
Broadwell suddenly appeared. Broadwell was standing there now with the
others, his hand raised, his head thrown back, stretching the white
flabby skin of his throat like a frog's, his eyes closed, as if he were
about to pronounce a benediction on Archie before sending him to his
doom.
Gard was repeating the oath:
"'You and each of you do solemnly swear that you will well and truly try
and true deliverance make in the cause now pending, wherein the State is
plaintiff and Archie Koerner is defendant, s'elp you God.'"
Broadwell bowed, as if for the jury; Marriott almost expected him to say
"Amen."
XIV
The next morning there were the same eager, impatient crowds, but there
were yet other preliminaries; the case must now be stated to the jury.
And Eades, speaking solemnly, told the jury of the pursuit of Archie and
the death of Kouka, all of which had been repeated many times. He spoke
of the importance of government, of the sacredness of human life, how
heinous a sin it is to kill people, and how important it was to put
Archie to death immediately in order that this truth might be better
understood, how serious were the juror's duties, how disagreeable his
own duties, and so forth. Then he began to describe the murder of
Margaret Flanagan, but Marriott objected. They wrangled over this for
some time, and, indeed, until Eades, assured that the jurors had been
sufficiently reminded of the Flanagan murder, felt satisfied. Then
Marriott stated the case for the defense, and finally, that afternoon,
the trial began in earnest.
Bentley, following his elaborate system of arrangement, bustled about
with a deputy at hand so that he could command him, pushed back the
crowd, locked the doors, and thereafter admitted no one unless he wished
to. The spectators filled the space outside the bar, and encroached on
the space within, forming a dense, closely-packed circle in the center
of which were the jury, the lawyers at their tables, Archie and Danner,
the reporters, the old stenographer, and Glassford looking down from the
bench. The spectators in a strained, nervous silence stared into the
pit where the game was to be played, the game for which Eades and
Marriott were nerving themselves, the game that had Archie's life for
its colossal stake.
But as the afternoon wore on, expectations were not realized; the
interest flagged. It was seen that the sensations would not come for
days, the proceedings were to move slowly and with a vast and pompous
deliberation to their unrevealed climax. Eades called as witnesses
several laborers who had been of the crowd that pursued Archie and Curly
down the tracks that morning. After them came Weber, the coroner, a
fleshy man with red face and neck, who described the inquest, then his
official physician, Doctor Zimmerman, a young man with a pointed beard,
who wore three chains on his breast, one for the eye-glasses he was
constantly readjusting, another for his clinical thermometer, and
another for his watch. He gave the details of the post-mortem
examination, described the dissection of Kouka's body, and identified
the bullet.
The crowd pressed forward, trying to find some sensation in the ghastly
relic. Eades gave the bullet to the nearest juryman, who examined it
carefully and passed it on. It went from hand to hand of the jurymen,
each rolled it in his palm, studied it with a look of wisdom; finally it
returned to Eades. And the jurors leaned back in their chairs,
convinced that Kouka was dead.
The next morning there were other laborers, other physicians, then
railroad detectives, who identified the revolver. The day wore away,
the atmosphere of the court-room became heavy and somnolent. As
skilfully as he could, Eades drew from his witnesses their stories,
avoiding all questions that might disclose facts to Archie's advantage,
and Marriott battled with these hostile witnesses in long
cross-examinations, seeking in vain for some flaw, some inconsistency.
The tedium told on the nerves,--Eades and Marriott had several quarrels,
exchanged insults, Glassford was petulant, the stolid jurymen exhaled
breaths as heavy as snores. Another day came, and judge and lawyers
began with steadier nerves, more impersonal and formal manners; they
were able to maintain a studious courtesy, the proceedings had an
institutional character, something above the human, but as the day
advanced, as the struggle grew more intense, as the wrangling became
more frequent, it was seen that they were but men, breaking down and
giving way to those passions their calm and stately institution
condemned and punished in other men.
And through it all Archie sat there silent, and, as the newspaper men
scrupulously reported each day, unmoved. But Marriott could hear him
breathe, and when occasionally he glanced at him, could see tiny drops
of moisture glistening on his brow, could see the cords swelling in his
neck, could even hear the gurgle in his throat as he tried to swallow.
Archie rarely spoke; he glanced at the witnesses, now and then at the
jurors, but most of all at Eades. Thus far, however, the testimony had
been formal; there was yet no evidence of premeditation on Archie's
part, and that was the vital thing.
XV
And yet Marriott knew better than to hope. As he walked to the
court-house Monday morning, he wondered how he was to get through the
week. He looked on those he met as the strangely happy and favored
beings of another world, and envied them keenly, even the ragged
outcasts shoveling the newly-fallen snow from the sidewalks. And there
in the upper corridor was that hated crowd, that seemed to be in league
with Eades, Glassford, the jury, the police, the whole machinery of the
state, to kill Archie, to stamp his identity out of the world. Just
then the crowd gyrated in precipitated interest, and he saw Bentley and
Danner bringing Archie down the hall, all three stamping the snow from
their boots. And he saw another figure, new to him, but one that
instantly filled him with strange foreboding. Why, he could not tell,
but this was the effect of the figure that shambled down the corridor.
The man was alone, a tall gaunt form in rough gray clothes, with a long
gray face, walking in loose gangling strides, flinging his huge feet one
after the other, leaving moist tracks behind him. A hickory cane
dangled by its crook from his left arm, he slowly smoked a cigar, taking
it from his mouth occasionally with an uncouth gesture. As he swung
along in his awkward, spraddling gait, his frame somehow conveyed
paradoxically an impression of strength. It seemed that at any moment
this man was in danger of coming apart and collapsing--until Marriott
caught his restless eye.
Archie had seen him the instant he entered the corridor. Marriott
detected Archie's recognition, and he looked intently for some inkling
of the meaning. The man, in the same instant, saw Archie, stopped, took
his cigar from his lips, spat, and said in a peculiar, soft voice:
"Why, Archie, my boy."
This incident deepened Marriott's foreboding. A few moments later, as
the bailiff was opening court, the man entered with a familiar and
accustomed air, and Bentley got a chair and made him comfortable so that
he might enjoy the trial.
"Who's that man?" Marriott whispered to Archie.
"That? That's old Jimmy Ball, the deputy warden at the pen."
"What do you suppose--"
"He's here to knock, that's what. He's here to rap ag'in me, the old--"
Archie applied his ugly epithet with an expression of intensest hatred,
and glared at Ball. Now and then Archie repeated the epithet under his
breath, trying each time to strengthen it with some new oath.
But Marriott just then had no time to learn the significance of this
strange presence. Eades was calling a witness.
"Detective Quinn!"
Quinn came in after the usual delay, walking with the policeman's
swagger even after years on the detective force. He came in with his
heavy shoulders set well back, and his head held high, but his eyes had
the fixed stare of self-consciousness. Taking the oath, he ascended the
witness-stand, leaned over, placed his hat against the side of the
chair, and then, crossing one fat thigh over the other, held it in
position with his hand. On his finger flashed a diamond, another
diamond sparkled on his shirt-front.
"Pipe the rocks!" whispered Archie. "Know where he got 'em? Jane
nicked a sucker and Quinn made her give 'em to him for not rapping."
Marriott impatiently waved Archie into silence; like all clients he was
constantly leaning over at critical moments of the trial to say
immaterial things, and, besides, his hot moist breath directly in
Marriott's ear was very unpleasant.
Eades led Quinn through the preliminaries of his examination, and then
in a tone that indicated an approach to significant parts of the
testimony, he said:
"You may now state, Mr. Quinn, when you next saw the defendant."
Quinn threw back his head, fingered his close-cropped red mustache, and
reflected as if he had not thought of the subject for a long time. He
was conscious that he was thus far the most important witness of the
trial. He relished the sensation, and, knowing how damaging his
testimony would be, he felt a crude satisfaction. Presently he spoke,
his voice vibrating like a guitar string in the tense atmosphere.
"The Friday morning before the Flanagan murder."
"Where did you meet him?"
"In Kentucky Street near Cherokee."
"Was he alone, or was some one with him?"
"Another man was with him."
"Who was that other man--if you know?"
"He was an old-timer; they call him Dad."
"What do you mean by an 'old-timer'?"
"An old-time thief--an ex-convict."
"Very well. Now tell the jury what you did--if anything."
"Well, I knowed Koerner was just back from the pen, and we got to
talking."
"What did he say?"
"Oh, I don't just remember. We chewed the rag a little."
Eades scowled and hitched up his chair.
"Did he say anything about Kouka?"
"Hold on!" Marriott shouted. "We object! You know perfectly well you
can't lead the witness."
"Well, don't get excited," said Eades, as if he never got excited
himself; as he had not, indeed, in that instance, his lawyer's ruse
having so well served its purpose. "I'll withdraw the question." He
thought a moment and then asked:
"What further, if anything, was said?"
"Oh," said Quinn, who had understood. "Well, he asked me where Kouka
was. You see he had it in for Kouka."
"No!" cried Marriott. "Not that."
"Just tell what he said about Kouka," Eades continued.
"I was trying to," said Quinn, as if hurt by Marriott's interruption.
"Ever since Kouka sent him up for--"
"Now look here!" Marriott cried, "this has gone far enough. Mr. Eades
knows--"
"Oh, proceed, gentlemen," said Glassford wearily, as if he were far
above any such petty differences, and the spectators laughed, relishing
these little passages between the lawyers.
"Mr. Quinn," said Eades in a low, almost confidential tone, "confine
yourself to the questions, please. Answer the last question."
Quinn, flashing surly and reproachful glances at Marriott, replied:
"Well, he asked about Kouka, where he was and all that, and he said,
says he, 'I'm going to get him!'"
The jury was listening intently. Even Glassford cocked his head.
"I asked him what he meant, and he said he had it in for Kouka and was
going to croak him."
Archie had been leaning forward, his eyes fixed in an incredulous stare,
his face had turned red, then white, and now he said, almost audibly:
"Well, listen to that, will you!"
"Sh!" said Marriott.
Archie dropped back, and Marriott heard him muttering under his breath,
marveling at Quinn's effrontery.
"Tell the jury what further, if anything, was said," Eades was saying.
"Nothing much," said Quinn; "that was about all."
"What did you do after that?"
"I placed him under arrest."
"Why?"
"Well, I didn't think it was safe for him to be around--feeling that
way."
"If he ain't the limit!" Marriott heard Archie exclaim, and he began his
whispered curses and objurgations again. In his excitement and impotent
rage, Marriott was exceedingly irritable, and again he commanded Archie
to be still.
Eades paused in his examination, bit his lip, and winked rapidly as he
thought. The atmosphere of the trial showed that a critical moment had
come. Marriott, watching Eades out of the corner of his eye, had
quietly, almost surreptitiously moved back from the table, and he sat
now on the edge of the chair. The jurymen were glancing from Eades to
Marriott, then at Quinn, with curious, puzzled expressions.
"Mr. Quinn," said Eades, looking up, "when did you next see Koerner--if
at all?"
"On the next Tuesday after that."
"Where?"
"In the C. and M. railroad yards."
"Who was with you, if any one?"
"Detectives Kouka, and Officers Delaney and O'Brien, of the railroad,
and Officers Flaherty, Nunnally, O'Toole and Finn--besides a lot of
citizens. I don't--"
"That will suffice. And how came you--but first--" Eades interrupted
himself. Marriott was still watching him narrowly, and Eades, it
seemed, was postponing a question he feared to ask. "First, tell
me--tell the jury--where Koerner was, and who, if anybody, was with
him?"
"Well, sir, this here fellow they call Curly--Jackson's his name--he's a
thief--a yegg man as they call 'em--he was with him; they was running
and we was chasing 'em."
"And why were you chasing them?"
"We had orders."
"From whom?"
"Inspector McFee."
"What were those orders?"
"Well, sir, there had been a report of that Flanagan job--"
"Stop!" Marriott shouted. "We object."
"One moment, Mr. Quinn," said Eades, with an effect of quieting Marriott
as much as of staying Quinn. Marriott had risen and was leaning over the
table. Eades hesitated, realizing that the question on his lips would
precipitate one of the great conflicts of the trial. He was in grave
doubt of the propriety of this question; he had been considering it for
weeks, not only in its legal but in its moral aspect. He had been
unable to convince himself that Archie had been concerned in the murder
of Margaret Flanagan; he had been uncertain of his ability to show
premeditation in the killing of Kouka. He knew that he could not
legally convict Archie of murdering the woman, and he knew he could not
convict him of murdering the detective unless he took advantage of the
feeling that had been aroused by the Flanagan tragedy. Furthermore, if
he failed to convict Archie, the public would not understand, but would
doubt and criticize him, and his reputation would suffer. And he
hesitated, afraid of his case, afraid of himself. The moments were
flying, a change even then was taking place, a subtle doubt was being
instilled in the minds of the crowd, of the jurymen even. He hesitated
another moment, and then to justify himself in his own mind, he said:
"Mr. Quinn, don't answer the question I am about to ask until the court
tells you to do so." He paused, and then: "I'll ask you, Mr. Quinn, to
tell the jury when you first heard the report of the murder of Margaret
Flanagan."
"Object!"
Marriott sprang to his feet, his eyes blazing, his figure tense with
protest.
"I object! We might as well fight this thing out right here."
"What is your objection?" asked Glassford.
"Just this, your Honor," Marriott replied. "The question, if allowed,
would involve another homicide, for which this defendant is not on
trial. It is not competent at this stage of the case to show
specifically or generally other offenses with which this defendant has
been charged or of which he is suspected. It would be competent, if
ever, only as showing reputation, and the reputation of the defendant
has not yet been put in evidence. Further, if answered in its present
form, the evidence would be hearsay."
Eades had been idly turning a lead-pencil end for end on the table, and
now with a smile he slowly got to his feet.
"If the Court please," he began, "Mr. Marriott evidently does not
understand; we are not seeking to show the defendant's reputation, or
that he is charged with or suspected of any other crime. What we are
trying to show is that these officers, Detective Quinn and the deceased,
were merely performing a duty when they attempted to arrest Koerner,
that they were acting under orders. What we offer to show is this:
Margaret Flanagan had been murdered and the officers had reasonable
grounds to believe that Koerner--"
"Now see here!" cried Marriott. "That isn't fair, and you know it. You
are trying to influence the jury, and I'm surprised that a lawyer of
your ability and standing should resort to tactics so unprofessional--"
Eades colored and was about to reply, but Marriott would not yield.
"I say that such tactics are unworthy of counsel; they would be unworthy
of the veriest pettifogger!"
Eades flushed angrily.
"Do you mean to charge--" he challenged.
"Gentlemen, gentlemen!" Glassford warned them. "Address yourselves to
the Court."
Eades and Marriott exchanged angry and menacing glances. The jury
looked on with a passivity that passed very well for gravity. At the
risk of incurring the jurors' displeasure, Marriott asked that they be
excused while the question was debated, and Glassford sent them from the
room.
The legal argument began. Marriott had countless precedents to justify
Glassford's ruling in his favor, just as Eades had countless precedents
to justify Glassford's ruling in his favor, but to the spectators it all
seemed useless, tedious and silly. A murder had been committed, they
thought, and hence it was necessary that some one be killed; and there
sat Archie Koerner--why wait and waste all this time? why not proceed at
once to the tragic denouement and decree his death?
Glassford, maintaining a gravity, and as if he were considering all the
cases Marriott and Eades were citing, and weighing them nicely one
against the other, listened to the arguments all day, gazing out of the
window at the scene so familiar to him. Across the street, in an upper
room of a house, was a window he had been interested in for months. A
woman now and then hovered near it, and Glassford had long been
tantalized by his inability to see clearly what she was doing.
The next morning Glassford announced his decision. It was to the effect
that the State would be permitted to show only that a felony had been
committed, and that the officers had had grounds for believing that
Archie had committed it; but as to details of that murder, or whether
Archie had committed it, or who had committed it--that should all be
excluded. This was looked upon as a victory for the defense, and, at
Marriott's request, Glassford told the jurors that they were not to
consider anything that had been said about the Flanagan murder or
Archie's connection with it. All this, he told them, they were to
dismiss from their minds and not to be influenced by it in the least.
The jurymen paid Glassford an exaggerated, almost servile attention, and
when he had done, several of them nodded. And all were glad that they
were to hear nothing more of the Flanagan murder, for, during the long
hours of their exclusion from the court-room, they had talked of nothing
but the Flanagan murder, had recalled all of its details, and argued and
disputed about it, until they had tired of it, and then had gone on to
recall other murders that had been committed in the county, and finally,
other murders of which they had heard and read.
Quinn, in telling again the story the jurors had heard so many times in
court, and had read in the newspapers, frequently referred to the
Flanagan murder, until Marriott wearied of the effort to prevent him.
He knew that it was useless to cross-examine Quinn, useless to attempt
to impress on the crystallized minds of the jurymen the facts as they
had occurred. The jurymen were not listening; they were looking at the
ceiling, or leaning their heads on their hands, enduring the proceedings
as patiently as they could, as patiently as Eades or Quinn or Glassford.
And Marriott reflected on the inadequacy of every means of communication
between human beings. How was he to make them understand? How was he
to get them to assume, if for an instant only, his point of view? Here
they were in a court of justice, an institution that had been evolved,
by the pressure of economic and social forces, through slow, toiling
ages; the witnesses were sworn to tell "the truth, the whole truth, and
nothing but the truth," and yet, such was man's puerility and impotence,
such was the imperfection of his means of conveying ideas, that the
whole truth could not possibly be told--a thousand elements and
incidents must be omitted; the moods, for instance, of Archie when he
talked to Quinn or to Kouka, the expressions on their faces, the light
in their eyes, indications far more potent than mere words, words that
might be lightly, trivially, innocently spoken one day and under one set
of circumstances, but which, on some other day and under other
circumstances, would take on a terrible, blasting, tragic significance.
Above all, that intangible thing, the atmosphere of the occasion--this
could by no possibility be reproduced even though Quinn made every
effort to be honest. And how much greater the impossibility when Quinn
was willing to be disingenuous, to allow the prejudices and the passions
of his hearers to reflect on his words their own sentiments, so that the
hatred in the hearts of this this jury, these prosecutors, might seem to
be a hatred, instead, in Archie's breast! Realizing the impossibility,
Marriott felt again the strong, occult influences that opposed him, and
had scarcely the strength to cross-examine Quinn. And yet he must make
the effort, and for two long hours he battled with Quinn, set his wits
and his will against him, but it was all hopeless. For he was not
opposing Quinn's mind alone, he was opposing the collective mind of this
crowd behind him, and that larger crowd in the city outside.
"Anything further, Mr. Marriott?" asked Glassford.
Marriott had a momentary rage at this impersonation of the vengeful
state sitting before him, and exclaimed with disgust:
"Oh, I guess not."
XVI
The instant Marriott entered the court-house the next morning he was
sensible of a change; it was as palpable as the heavy, overheated
atmosphere indoors after the cool air outdoors. He could not account
for this change; he knew only that it had come in the night, and that it
boded some calamity in the world. Already it seemed to have had its
effect on the men he met, clerks, attaches, and loafers; they glanced at
him stealthily, then averted their eyes quickly. Somehow they filled
Marriott with loathing and disgust.
As he went up in the swiftly-ascending elevator, the old man who
operated it gave him that same look, and then observed:
"Something's in the air to-day."
Yes, thought Marriott, something is in the air. But what?
"I reckon it's going to storm," the white-headed veteran of the great
war went on. "My rheumatiz hurts like hell this morning."
What mysterious relation was it, wondered Marriott, that bound this old
man through his joints--gnarled by the exposure of his service to his
country so long before--to all nature, foretelling her convulsions and
cataclysms? What mysterious relation was it that bound men's minds to
the moral world, foretelling as well its catastrophes and tragedies?
"I reckon it's the January thaw," the old fellow jabbered on, his mind
never rising above the mere physical manifestations of nature.
The crowd was denser than ever, and there in the front row, where she
had been every day of the trial, was old Mrs. Koerner, with eyes that
every day grew deeper and wider, as more and more tragedy was reflected
in their profound and mysterious depths.
"Call Henry Griscom," said Eades.
The crowd, the jury, the lawyers, waited. Marriott wondered; he felt
Archie's breath in his ear and heard his teeth chatter as he whispered:
"I knew old Jimmy Ball had something framed up. Great God!"
The crowd made way, and the tall, lank form of the deputy warden
shambled into the court-room. A man was chained to him.
"Great God!" Archie was chattering; "he's going to split on me!"
The man whom Ball had just unshackled took the oath, and looked
indecisively into Ball's eyes. Ball motioned with his cane, and with a
slow mechanical step, the man walked to the witness-stand and perched
himself uneasily on the edge of the chair.
Archie fixed his eyes on the man in a steady, intense blaze; Marriott
heard him cursing horribly.
"The snitch!" he said finally, and then was silent, as if he had put his
whole contempt into that one word.
The emaciated form of the man in the witness chair was clothed in the
gray jacket and trousers of a convict of the first grade. The collar of
his jacket stood out from a scrawny neck that had a nude, leathery,
rugose appearance, like the neck of a buzzard. If he wore a shirt, it
was not visible, either at his neck or at his spindling wrists. As he
hung his head and tried to shrink from the concentrated gaze of the
crowd into his miserable garments, he suggested a skeleton, dressed up
in ribald sport. It was not until Eades had spoken twice that the man
raised his head, and then he raised it slowly, carefully, as if dreading
to look men in the eyes. His shaven face was long and yellow; the skin
at the points of his jaw, at his retreating chin and at his high
cheek-bones was tightly stretched, and shone; he rolled his yellow
eye-balls, and winked rapidly in the light of freedom to which he was so
unaccustomed.
"Who is he?" Marriott whispered quickly.
"An old con.--a lifer," Archie explained. "One o' them false alarms.
He's no good. They've promised to put him on the street for this."
But Eades had begun his examination.
"And where do you reside, Mr. Griscom?" Eades was asking in a respectful
tone, just as if the man might be a resident of Claybourne Avenue.
"In the penitentiary."
"How long have you been there?"
"Seventeen years."
"And your sentence is for how long?" Eades continued.
The man's eyes drooped.
"Life." The word fell in a hollow silence.
"And do you know this man here--Archie Koerner?"
The convict, as if by an effort, raised his eyes to Archie, dropped them
hastily and nodded.
"What do you say?" said Eades. "You must speak up."
"Yes, I know him."
"Where did you know him?"
"In the pen."
It was all clear now, the presence of Ball, the newspapers' promise of a
sensation, the doom that had hung in the atmosphere that morning.
Marriott watched the convict first with loathing, then with pity, as he
realized the fact that when this man had spoken the one word "life"--he
had meant "death"--a long, lingering death, drawn out through
meaningless days and months and years, blank and barren, a waste in
which this one incident, this railroad journey in chains, this temporary
reassertion of personality, this brief distinction in the crowded
court-room, this hour of change, of contact with free men, were
circumstances to occupy his vacant mind during the remaining years of
his misery, until his death should end and life once more come to him.
"And now, Mr. Griscom," Eades was saying with a respect that was a
mockery, "tell the jury just what Koerner said to you about Detective
Kouka."
The convict hesitated, his chin sank into the upright collar of his
jacket, his eyes roved over the floor, he crossed, uncrossed and
recrossed his legs, picked at his cap nervously.
"Just tell the jury," urged Eades.
The convict stiffly raised his bony hand to his blue lips to stifle the
cough in which lay his only hope of release.
"I don't just--" He stopped.
The crowd strained forward. The jury glanced uneasily from Griscom to
Eades, and back to Griscom again. And then there was a stir. Ball was
sidling over from the clerk's desk to a chair Bentley wheeled forward
for him, and as he sank into it, he fixed his eyes on Griscom. The
convict shifted uneasily, took down his hand, coughed loosely and
swallowed painfully, his protuberant larynx rising and falling.
"Just give Koerner's exact words," urged Eades.
"Well, he said he had it in for Kouka, and was going to croak him when
he got home."
"What did he mean by 'croak,' if you know?"
"Kill him. He said he was a dead shot--he'd learned it in the army."
"How many times did you talk with him?"
"Oh, lots of times--every time we got a chance. Sometimes in the bolt
shop, sometimes in the hall when we had permits."
"What else, if anything, did he say about Kouka?"
"Oh, he said Kouka'd been laggin' him, and he was goin' to get him. He
talked about it pretty much all the time."
"Is that all?"
"That's about all, yes, sir."
"Take the witness."
Griscom, evidently relieved, had started to leave the chair, and as he
moved he drew his palm across a gray brow that suddenly broke out in
repulsive little drops of perspiration.
"One moment, Griscom," said Marriott, "I'd like to ask you a few
questions."
The court was very still, and every one hung with an interest equal to
Marriott's on the convict's next words. Griscom found all this interest
too strong; his pallid lips were parted; he drew his breath with
difficulty, his chest was moving with automatic jerks; presently he
coughed.
Marriott began to question the convict about his conversations with
Archie. He did this in the belief that while Archie had no doubt
breathed his vengeance against Kouka, his words, under the
circumstances, were not to be given that dreadful significance which now
they were made to assume. He could imagine that they had been uttered
idly, and that they bore no real relation to his shooting of Kouka. But
the difficulty was to make this clear to the crystallized, stupid and
formal minds of the jury, or rather to Broadwell, who was the jury. He
tried to induce Griscom to describe the circumstances under which Archie
had made these threats, but Griscom was almost as stupid as the jurors,
and the law was more stupid than either, for Griscom in his effort to
meet the questions was continually making answers that involved his own
conclusions, and to them Eades always objected, and Glassford always
sustained the objections. And Marriott experienced the same sensations
that he had when Quinn was testifying. There was no way to reproduce
Archie's manner--his tone, his expression, the look in his eyes.
To hide his chagrin, Marriott wiped his mouth with his handkerchief,
leaned over and consulted his notes.
"A life is a long time, isn't it, Griscom?" he resumed, gently now.
"Yes." Griscom's chin fell to his breast.
"And the penitentiary is not a good place to be?"
Griscom looked up with the first flash of real spirit he had displayed.
"I wouldn't send a dog there, Mr. Marriott!"
"No," said Marriott, "and you'd like to get out?"
"Sure."
"You've applied for a pardon?"
"Yes."
Marriott's heart was beating fast. At last he had a hope. He could
hear the ticking of the big clock on the wall, he could catch the faint
echoes of his voice against the high ceiling of the room whose acoustic
properties were so poor, he could hear the very breathing of the crowd
behind him.