"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?"