The Perfume of Eros: A Fifth Avenue Incident Part 26

Paternally the Recorder looked over and down. "The witness need not answer that unless----"

Annandale interrupted him. "I am much obliged to Your Honor, but really I have nothing to conceal. I was drunk, deplorably so."

"Habit of yours, is it?" Peac.o.c.k snapped.

Annandale took a monocle from a pocket, screwed it in his eye, looked through it at Peac.o.c.k, smiled at him, with an air of fathomless good fellows.h.i.+p, answered: "Dear me, no. Is it one of yours?"

"Oho!" cried Peac.o.c.k, pocketing the insult but pouncing at the point, "you were drunk on this occasion only. Got drunk for it, did you?"

"No," Annandale blandly and confidentially replied. "You see, don't you know, it was the day of the panic. I had dropped a good lot of money--a good lot, I mean, for me--and, as the saying is, I tried to drown my sorrows."

"But you found that they could swim, didn't you? Now, tell me, among these sorrows was not the greatest the one to which your former butler has testified, your late wife's desire for a divorce in order that she might marry Loftus? Is it not a fact that she told you so, and that you then said, 'I'll kill him, I'll kill Royal Loftus like the dog that he is'?"

"I recall no such conversation."

"What, then, was the nature of the conversation that pa.s.sed between you and your wife on this particular evening?"

"I don't remember."

"The conversation and the threat to which your butler has sworn may therefore have occurred without your now recalling it. Is that not so?"

"Everything is possible, you know," Annandale answered with a phrase unconsciously borrowed of Orr. "But I doubt it very much for the reason----"

"Here," interrupted Peac.o.c.k. "I don't want your doubts or your reasons or your haha airs. I want answers from you, direct answers. Where did you go and what did you do after your threat?"

To this Orr objected. A wrangle ensued. Orr was sustained. Peac.o.c.k reconstructed his question. Annandale answered that he had gone to Miss Waldron's, but that he remembered nothing else.

"Is this yours?" Peac.o.c.k suddenly asked, producing the pistol marked exhibit A.

"Probably," said Annandale, looking, not at it, but at the ceiling.

"That's all."

Annandale got from the stand. Others succeeded him there, experts for the defense, men who recited their qualities and degrees as though they were eating truffles to the sound of trumpets. One after another they testified that liquor can ablate memory partially, wholly; can ablate it regarding events antecedent and subsequent to a rememorated point between; can, moreover, leave the subject in a condition apparently normal yet actually in a state of trance.

"Do you really regard these people as experts?" Peac.o.c.k with pitying contempt asked of Orr. Then at once in reb.u.t.tal were other experts, equally pleased with themselves, humorously disposing of psychical epilepsy, affecting to regard it as a medicolegal myth. Among the spectators the usual jest circulated. The mendacious were subdivided into liars, d.a.m.ned liars, expert witnesses. Yet there you were. But not Orr. Tortuously he involved the deponents in helpful contradictions, smiling at them, at Peac.o.c.k and the jury, smiling with an air of saying "You see what confounded idiots these imbeciles are."

But the session was closing. One more witness remained to be called.

"Miss Waldron, will you take the stand?"

With the charming manner of the thoroughbred New York girl Sylvia circled the room. It was refres.h.i.+ng to see her, refres.h.i.+ng to hear the way in which she corroborated what Annandale had said.

"But," objected Peac.o.c.k, "you had just gone from his house; what did he go to yours for?"

"To restore a string of pearls."

"Did he repeat to you anything that he had said to his wife?"

"Had he attempted to I should have refused to listen."

"Was he drunk?"

"I cannot say. I have never seen anyone in that condition."

"Did he make any threats regarding Loftus?"

"A gentleman does not make threats."

"Miss Waldron, I will thank you to answer me directly. Did he or did he not?"

"He did not."

"You swear to that?"

"I do."

It was perjury, of course. Yet if a girl may not perjure herself like a lady for the man she loves things have come to a pretty pa.s.s. That idea apparently struck Peac.o.c.k.

"Prior to the defendant's marriage you were engaged to him, were you not?"

"I was."

"Are you engaged to him now?"

Very prettily and gracefully, without embarra.s.sment, rather with pride, Sylvia answered: "I am."

"That's all," said Peac.o.c.k. "The State rests." But as he said it he looked at the jury and sighed, sighed audibly, much as were he adding, "You may judge the value of her testimony from that."

The resting, however, was but figurative. In a moment the summing up began, a summing which, at first pa.s.sionless as algebra, dealt with technical points.

"Gentlemen," said Peac.o.c.k turning again to the jury, "the evidence in this case is of the kind known to you perhaps as circ.u.mstantial.

Evidence of this nature can lead and often does lead to a conclusion more satisfactory than direct evidence can produce. Circ.u.mstances cannot lie any more than facts can. Unless we resort to them it is in vain that we attempt to detect and to punish crime. Crime shuns the light of day. It seeks darkness. It courts secrecy. The a.s.sa.s.sin moves stealthily. He calls no witness to see him shoot his victim down. If you wait for an eye-witness you grant impunity to crime. It is true, and probably you will be so told by counsel for the defense, that there are cases in which the innocent have been convicted. Yet if men have been erroneously convicted on circ.u.mstantial evidence, so have they been convicted on direct testimony also. That is not, though, a reason for declining to accept such testimony. The possibility of error exists alike. But because men may err do they refuse to act? Because wheat may be blighted does the farmer refuse to sow? No, gentlemen. Until we have means of knowledge beyond our present faculties we must accept this kind of evidence or grant practical immunity to crime."

The exordium concluded, Peac.o.c.k warmed to his work. What he said he seemed to literally tear from his mouth. It was an arraignment not delivered but hurled, headlong, with the force and rush of a cavalry charge. Before it Orr's points sank overwhelmed. To replace them with others of his own Peac.o.c.k made new ones, evolving them with a fire and lucidity that was pyrotechnic. They were like bombs exploding before the jury's eyes. He arraigned the defendant, arraigned the defense, stampeded their tactics, denounced Annandale's manner, which he declared to be that of a hardened criminal, and pictured him as a jealous husband who, in accordance with a plot long premeditated, had first lured his victim to his house, then following him thence had murdered him in the darkness, but who now swore that he was drunk and remembered nothing. "a.s.suming that he was drunk," Peac.o.c.k shouted, "his intoxication was a feigned disguise, a.s.sumed for the purpose and legally an aggravation of his dastard crime."

Beneath, in the unlovely street, an organ was tossing a jig. The jolts of it mounted to the court, fusing with Peac.o.c.k's voice, adding their vulgarity to his own, and it was to the wretchedness of them that he said at last: "My duty is done."

He had scored points by the dozen. In as many seconds Orr had their heads off by half.

"Harris, gentlemen, is the rock of the People's case. His hand fas.h.i.+oned it. Without him it crumbles. Let me array for you Harris against Harris."

Leisurely Orr began, showing the man's hand for what it was, not dirty and disreputable merely, but discredited.

"Apart from that hand where is the promised evidence? Where is it?

Where is that evidence? Gentlemen, not a bit of evidence have you had, not a molecule, not a minim, not a mite. At best or at worst any evidence producible against this defendant would be circ.u.mstantial. In telling you the value of such testimony the District Attorney has been good enough to leave it to me to explain that testimony of this character must, to be conclusive, exclude every other reasonable hypothesis. The District Attorney has further told you that circ.u.mstances cannot lie. Of all his statements that one and that one alone is correct. Circ.u.mstances cannot lie. But witnesses can. It is from them that circ.u.mstances are obtained. And though they furnish a million circ.u.mstances, what are these circ.u.mstances worth if they themselves are unsound? How unsound that reptile Harris is, you have, I believe, been enabled to judge. But even otherwise, even though the testimony of that saurian seem to you probable, I may remind you that the most probable things often prove false, for the reason that if they were exempt from falsity they would cease to be probable; they would be certain.

"Now what certainty has the District Attorney brought you? Instead of excluding every other reasonable hypothesis, he has opened the door to a dozen hypotheses infinitely more reasonable than his own. Except that the obligatory instrument does not appear to have been found, he has adduced nothing to show that the deceased did not commit suicide.