“No, that wasn’t it.
But I didn’t want to stay around there. I’ve said why.”
“I see.
But after you got down to Sharon where you felt a little more safe — a little further away, you didn’t lose any time in eating, did you?
It tasted pretty good all right down there, didn’t it?”
“Oh, I don’t know about that.
I had a cup of coffee and a sandwich.”
“And a piece of pie, too, as we’ve already proved here,” added Mason.
“And after that you joined the crowd coming up from the depot as though you had just come up from Albany, as you afterwards told everybody.
Wasn’t that it?”
“Yes, that was it.”
“Well, now for a really innocent man who only so recently experienced a kindly change of heart, don’t you think you were taking an awful lot of precaution?
Hiding away like that and waiting in the dark and pretending that you had just come up from Albany.”
“I’ve explained all that,” persisted Clyde.
Mason’s next tack was to hold Clyde up to shame for having been willing, in the face of all she had done for him, to register Roberta in three different hotel registers as the unhallowed consort of presumably three different men in three different days.
“Why didn’t you take separate rooms?”
“Well, she didn’t want it that way.
She wanted to be with me.
Besides I didn’t have any too much money.”
“Even so, how could you have so little respect for her there, and then be so deeply concerned about her reputation 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 some one 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 cook-book 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.”