“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 or eight months at the most.
I agreed to let you go by then, you know, if you want to.
I can be very saving and economical.
It can’t be any other way now, Clyde, although for your own sake I wish it could.’
What do you suppose all that means —‘saving and economical’— and not letting you go until after eight months?
Living in a hall bedroom and you coming to see her once a week?
Or hadn’t you really agreed to go away with her and marry her, as she seems to think here?”
“I don’t know unless she thought she could make me, maybe,” replied Clyde, the while various backwoodsmen and farmers and jurors actually sniffed and sneered, so infuriated were they by the phrase “make me” which Clyde had scarcely noticed.
“I never agreed to.”
“Unless she could make you.
So that was the way you felt about it, was it, Griffiths?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You’d swear to that as quick as you would to anything else?”
“Well, I have sworn to it.”
And Mason as well as Belknap and Jephson and Clyde himself now felt the strong public contempt and rage that the majority of those present had for him from the start — now surging and shaking all. It filled the room.
Yet before him were all the hours Mason needed in which he could pick and choose at random from the mass of testimony as to just what he would quiz and bedevil and torture Clyde with next.
And so now, looking over his notes — arranged fan- wise on the table by Earl Newcomb for his convenience — he now began once more with:
“Griffiths, in your testimony here yesterday, through which you were being led by your counsel, Mr. Jephson” (at this Jephson bowed sardonically), “you talked about that change of heart that you experienced after you encountered Roberta Alden once more at Fonda and Utica back there in July — just as you were starting on this death trip.”
Clyde’s “yes, sir,” came before Belknap could object, but the latter managed to have “death trip” changed to “trip.”
“Before going up there with her you hadn’t been liking her as much as you might have. Wasn’t that the way of it?”