The Accused - Harold R. Daniels (best novels for students TXT) 📗

corner waiting for Lolly—for Mrs. Morlock. I got there about eight-thirty because he always left a little after that. I waited about ten minutes and then she came out and got in the car and told me which way to go.

Liebman: Was the accused familiar with your car?

Cory: I didn’t think so but she said not to take any chances. I stayed a couple of blocks behind him—he was walking then—until he got in Mr. Dodson’s car and started out of town. Then I stayed far enough behind so he couldn’t see that he was being followed or who was in the car with me. He drove steady as far as South Danville, not in a hurry, and then he parked the car behind a filling station and got out.

Liebman: Did you stop at that time?

Cory: No. I slowed down a little but I drove on past and pulled off the road a little bit and stopped.

Liebman: How far past his car was that?

Cory: Maybe fifty yards. He didn’t look back. Mrs. Morlock was the one that said to stop there. We sat in the car and watched him walking up a little dirt road. He was looking straight ahead.

Liebman: What was her attitude at that time?

Cory: She seemed pretty excited. She said, “Come on. Let’s see where he goes.” I told her that I didn’t want any part of it and she got mad. She made me promise to wait for her and I said that I would unless her husband was with her when she came back. She hurried off the way he went—he was out of sight in the trees—and I stayed in the car and waited.

Liebman: You’re sure you stayed in the car? You’re sure you didn’t go into the woods with her?

Cory: I’m sure. I never got out of the car.

Liebman: How long did you wait?

Cory.: I guess it was about twenty minutes. Then I saw Mr. Morlock come running down the road. The road I told you about that the two of them walked up. You could tell just from the way he was running that something had happened and his face was bleeding. I started up my car and got out of there.

Liebman: Thou faithful lover. That’s all, Cory.

*

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts vs. Alvin Morlock. Cross-examination of William Cory.

What had been hardly more than an idle curiosity about Morlock’s absences each Sunday grew and festered in Louise’s mind. He had a hell of a nerve, she thought, treating her like a prisoner, not letting her have any money, not speaking to her and all the time carrying on some affair of his own.

How else could he be spending all that time? She reasoned, more cunningly, that if she could catch him at it she would have the satisfaction of bringing him down to her own level—the level on which he placed her—and he could no longer humiliate her with her own shortcomings. But she would have to catch him in the act; right in the middle of the act so that he could have no possible defense. She had tried to follow him one Sunday, thinking that he would head for some cheap hotel room or walk-up flat.

She would, she thought, give him just time enough and then she would rush in. She practiced the things she would say to him, and to his woman. Or if she could catch him at something queer like with that fag, Martin… so much the better. She rehearsed the things she would say until even the accusations she rejected remained in her mind as referring to facts accomplished, actual things she had seen. There was no longer any possible doubt in her about what he was doing, and her spying took on the air of a crusade. When, on that first Sunday of her espionage, he got into Dodson’s car and drove away she raged in her frustration and was more than ever convinced of his guilt. When Cory came, she asked him to drive for her so she could see where Morlock went. He was difficult but she had a sensual power over him that made him easy to control.

She watched Morlock throughout the week, impatient for Sunday to come, clutching her obsession to her like a mother clutching an infant. When Sunday did come and he did leave, she rushed to the appointed place to meet Cory, afraid that he might not be there. He was there and she got into the car, hardly aware of Cory at all.

Morlock, in the few weeks since he had rediscovered the sanctuary of Abram’s Rock, had already worked out a routine for his visits. By arrangement with Dodson he had the use of the old LaSalle until evening on each Sunday; in return he filled the car’s tank with gasoline at the filling station adjacent to the rock and thus repaid the filling station proprietor as well as Dodson.

He could park the car in back of the filling station and take the road to the rock without speaking to anyone, which was very important. He had reached a point where any conversation at all was an intrusion. Aware of the dangerous psychological ground on which he was treading, he rationalized. The rock was the only place where he could escape Louise, he told himself; the only place where he could be free of half a hundred reminders of the failure of his marriage.

He was aware of his own hypocrisy. In actual fact, he knew, he was visiting the rock less as a refuge than as a retreat from Ludlow, from being a second-class teacher and a failure. He spent hours each week on the rock, not in idle, harmless contemplation of what might have been but in an actual return to his youth. Here he and Marianna had played and daydreamed. Here he had been happy.

On Sunday, May 20th, he walked toward the rock in quiet anticipation. At the very summit there was a spot where the sun warmed the granite and where there was a fallen tree that he could sit on. Once he had crouched in tears at that very place, he remembered. And Marianna had come to him to ask, “Why are you crying?” That had been the day of his father’s funeral.

Today he would remember more pleasant times. He had the faculty of selecting his memories as an orchestra leader might choose a single work from all the creations of a composer. Morlock was also aware of the danger in this power of selection. He was not, he decided, hurting anyone except possibly himself. If he preferred to spend his solitude in a return to what was past—that was his privilege.

This gray slope up which he struggled—how many times he had seen Marianna skip to the top, slim and bare-legged, as graceful as he was clumsy.

When he was at last at the summit he found his fallen tree and sat down, warm from the exercise. Beyond he could see hills and pastures, green with the new grass of spring and populated only with grazing cattle, brown and black and white and looking like playthings from this height. There were towering spruce and hemlocks below the sheer side of the cliff over which he looked, but their tops never reached the height of the rock. This was the place where Abram, the Indian of the legend, had leaped, it was said. He remembered when he had told Marianna the story. Her eyes had widened and filled with pity.

“Was he killed?” she wanted to know.

“Sure,” he had told her with the contempt for death of boyhood. “It’s almost a thousand feet down.”

“He must have missed her very much,” she said thoughtfully. “Had they been married very long? What made her die?”

“I don’t know,” he had answered. “I guess she just got sick or something. Indians didn’t have doctors.”

She had been quiet for a little while. Then she said, “She must have been very glad that he loved her enough to jump when she die.”

At twelve he had been less interested in the legend than she. Nevertheless, when it was her turn to choose the game they would play, or the direction of their pretending, she often chose the legend of Abram as a focal point to set the stage. He never entered halfheartedly into the game because it was of her choosing or something that he might privately consider sissified; when she pretended that she could hear the dead Indian princess crying in the depths below them for Abram, he pretended that he could hear it too.

Once, when they played this game, she said gravely, “If they made me go away from here, I would wish that I could jump like Abram did, Alvin.”

He asked, in astonishment, “Why?”

“Because I would be sad at leaving here and going away from you.”

He was touched. “I guess I’d feel the same, Marianna.”

And it occurred to them both simultaneously. They would make a pact, solemnly and with pomp. They were friends. If anything happened to the one, the other would do as Abram had done.

These things were the subject of Morlock’s reminiscence when he heard the sound of someone approaching behind him. He had to recall himself to the present violently and with great conscious effort. He got to his feet and turned in the same motion; when he saw Louise climbing the last few feet to the top he could not believe what he saw. When he did believe it he said, “Louise—for God’s sake, what are you doing here?”

She had followed him up the rutted road from the filling station, stumbling in her high heels and flogged by the outstretched whips of birch and alder that had invaded the road. She caught only a glimpse of him from time to time but she had kept on, realizing that he could hardly have turned off the road. After a few minutes she had begun to perspire from the effort of trying to keep him in sight. The perspiration had stung her where the branches had scratched her skin but she had been unconscious of any pain in her urge to confront Morlock in all his guilt.

Even when he had started to climb the rock, she had not doubted for a moment that her obsession was based in reality; she only wondered at his choice of a trysting place. She had taken off her shoes to get a foothold on the smooth surface and started climbing the barely visible old trail to the top. She had come close enough to the summit to see him several seconds before he heard her and turned and she was profoundly disappointed when she saw that he was alone and that there could be no other person on the bare summit. Unable to believe this she glanced at every pebble, every crevice in the granite.

“I followed you,” she said when she had caught her breath. “Al, I thought you were seeing someone, the way you’ve been gone every Sunday.”

He was outraged at her intrusion. “How did you get here?” he demanded.

“I got someone to take me,” she said. A quick suspicion returned to her, a saving hope. Probably she was just too early. Probably someone was coming right this minute, the someone he was seeing. She turned to look back down the trail.

Morlock, after his first anger, felt a despairing sense of loss. The rock would never be the same again. It could never again be a sanctuary. With her mere presence she had dirtied it. He saw her backward look and interpreted it correctly.

“Don’t bother,” he said. “There isn’t anyone coming. You shouldn’t have come here, Louise.” He watched her move toward him,