An American Tragedy - Theodore Dreiser (librera reader txt) 📗

after she was dead that you had to run away and keep the secret of her death all to yourself, in order, as you say, to protect her name and reputation?”

“Your Honor,” interjected Belknap, “this isn’t a question. It’s an oration.”

“I withdraw the question,” countered Mason, and then went on. “Do you admit, by the way, that you are a mental and moral coward, Griffiths⁠—do you?”

“No, sir. I don’t.”

“You do not?”

“No, sir.”

“Then when you lie, and swear to it, you are just the same as any other person who is not a mental and moral coward, and deserving of all the contempt and punishment due a person who is a perjurer and a false witness. Is that correct?”

“Yes, sir. I suppose so.”

“Well, if you are not a mental and moral coward, how can you justify your leaving that girl in that lake⁠—after as you say you accidentally struck her and when you knew how her parents would soon be suffering because of her loss⁠—and not say one word to anybody⁠—just walk off⁠—and hide the tripod and your suit and sneak away like an ordinary murderer? Wouldn’t you think that that was the conduct of a man who had plotted and executed murder and was trying to get away with it⁠—if you had heard of it about someone else? Or would you think it was just the sly, crooked trick of a man who was only a mental and moral coward and who was trying to get away from the blame for the accidental death of a girl whom he had seduced and news of which might interfere with his prosperity? Which?”

“Well, I didn’t kill her, just the same,” insisted Clyde.

“Answer the question!” thundered Mason.

“I ask the court to instruct the witness that he need not answer such a question,” put in Jephson, rising and fixing first Clyde and then Oberwaltzer with his eye. “It is purely an argumentative one and has no real bearing on the facts in this case.”

“I so instruct,” replied Oberwaltzer. “The witness need not answer.” Whereupon Clyde merely stared, greatly heartened by this unexpected aid.

“Well, to go on,” proceeded Mason, now more nettled and annoyed than ever by this watchful effort on the part of Belknap and Jephson to break the force and significance of his each and every attack, and all the more determined not to be outdone⁠—“you say you didn’t intend to marry her if you could help it, before you went up there?”

“Yes, sir.”

“That she wanted you to but you hadn’t made up your mind?”

“Yes.”

“Well, do you recall the cookbook and the salt and pepper shakers and the spoons and knives and so on that she put in her bag?”

“Yes, sir. I do.”

“What do you suppose she had in mind when she left Biltz⁠—with those things in her trunk⁠—that she was going out to live in some hall bedroom somewhere, unmarried, while you came to see her once a week or once a month?”

Before Belknap could object, Clyde shot back the proper answer.

“I can’t say what she had in her mind about that.”

“You couldn’t possibly have told her over the telephone there at Biltz, for instance⁠—after she wrote you that if you didn’t come for her she was coming to Lycurgus⁠—that you would marry her?”

“No, sir⁠—I didn’t.”

“You weren’t mental and moral coward enough to be bullied into anything like that, were you?”

“I never said I was a mental and moral coward.”

“But you weren’t to be bullied by a girl you had seduced?”

“Well, I couldn’t feel then that I ought to marry her.”

“You didn’t think she’d make as good a match as Miss X?”

“I didn’t think I ought to marry her if I didn’t love her any more.”

“Not even to save her honor⁠—and your own decency?”

“Well, I didn’t think we could be happy together then.”

“That was before your great change of heart, I suppose.”

“It was before we went to Utica, yes.”

“And while you were still so enraptured with Miss X?”

“I was in love with Miss X⁠—yes.”

“Do you recall, in one of those letters to you that you never answered” (and here Mason proceeded to take up and read from one of the first seven letters), “her writing this to you; ‘I feel upset and uncertain about everything although I try not to feel so⁠—now that we have our plan and you are going to come for me as you said.’ Now just what was she referring to there when she wrote⁠—‘now that we have our plan’?”

“I don’t know unless it was that I was coming to get her and take her away somewhere temporarily.”

“Not to marry her, of course.”

“No, I hadn’t said so.”

“But right after that in this same letter she says: ‘On the way up, instead of coming straight home, I decided to stop at Homer to see my sister and brother-in-law, since I am not sure now when I’ll see them again, and I want so much that they shall see me respectable or never at all any more.’ Now just what do you suppose, she meant by that word ‘respectable’? Living somewhere in secret and unmarried and having a child while you sent her a little money, and then coming back maybe and posing as single and innocent or married and her husband dead⁠—or what? Don’t you suppose she saw herself married to you, for a time at least, and the child given a name? That ‘plan’ she mentions couldn’t have contemplated anything less than that, could it?”

“Well, maybe as she saw it it couldn’t,” evaded Clyde. “But I never said I would marry her.”

“Well, well⁠—we’ll let that rest a minute,” went on Mason doggedly. “But now take this,” and here he began reading from the tenth letter: “ ‘It won’t make any difference to you about your coming a few days sooner than you intended, will it, dear? Even if we have got to get along on a little less, I know we can, for the time I will be with you anyhow, probably no more than six