Look at this!”
And he held it out.
“Very gay, isn’t it?” he snarled.
And now Clyde, dubious and frightened, replied:
“But I wasn’t enjoying myself just the same!”
“Not when you were playing the banjo here?
Not when you were playing golf and tennis with your friends the very next day after her death?
Not when you were buying and eating thirteen-dollar lunches?
Not when you were with Miss X again, and where you yourself testified that you preferred to be?”
Mason’s manner was snarling, punitive, sinister, bitterly sarcastic.
“Well, not just then, anyhow — no, sir.”
“What do you mean —‘not just then’?
Weren’t you where you wanted to be?”
“Well, in one way I was — certainly,” replied Clyde, thinking of what Sondra would think when she read this, as unquestionably she would.
Quite everything of all this was being published in the papers every day.
He could not deny that he was with her and that he wanted to be with her.
At the same time he had not been happy.
How miserably unhappy he had been, enmeshed in that shameful and brutal plot!
But now he must explain in some way so that Sondra, when she should read it, and this jury, would understand.
And so now he added, while he swallowed with his dry throat and licked his lips with his dry tongue:
“But I was sorry about Miss Alden just the same.
I couldn’t be happy then — I couldn’t be.
I was just trying to make people think that I hadn’t had anything to do with her going up there — that’s all.
I couldn’t see that there was any better way to do.
I didn’t want to be arrested for what I hadn’t done.”
“Don’t you know that is false!
Don’t you know you are lying!” shouted Mason, as though to the whole world, and the fire and the fury of his unbelief and contempt was sufficient to convince the jury, as well as the spectators, that Clyde was the most unmitigated of liars.
“You heard the testimony of Rufus Martin, the second cook up there at Bear Lake?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You heard him swear that he saw you and Miss X at a certain point overlooking Bear Lake and that she was in your arms and that you were kissing her.
Was that true?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And that exactly four days after you had left Roberta Alden under the waters of Big Bittern.
Were you afraid of being arrested then?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Even when you were kissing her and holding her in your arms?”
“Yes, sir,” replied Clyde drearily and hopelessly.
“Well, of all things!” bawled Mason.
“Could you imagine such stuff being whimpered before a jury, if you hadn’t heard it with your own ears?
Do you really sit there and swear to this jury that you could bill and coo with one deceived girl in your arms and a second one in a lake a hundred miles away, and yet be miserable because of what you were doing?”
“Just the same, that’s the way it was,” replied Clyde.
“Excellent!
Incomparable,” shouted Mason.
And here he wearily and sighfully drew forth his large white handkerchief once more and surveying the courtroom at large proceeded to mop his face as much as to say: Well, this is a task indeed, then continuing with more force than ever:
“Griffiths, only yesterday on the witness stand you swore that you personally had no plan to go to Big Bittern when you left Lycurgus.”
“No, sir, I hadn’t.”
“But when you two got in that room at the Renfrew House in Utica and you saw how tired she looked, it was you that suggested that a vacation of some kind — a little one — something within the range of your joint purses at the time — would be good for her.
Wasn’t that the way of it?”
“Yes, sir.
That was the way of it,” replied Clyde. “But up to that time you hadn’t even thought of the Adirondacks specifically.”