"Well ... are you going to see her?" I said, giving in very unwillingly.
"No," said Mme. Storey, "she would repudiate her letter, I am sure. But when she comes up for trial, I'll have a look at her in the dock. Ask Crider to find out the date."
"If you're going by the letter," I said, "she warns you not to show your hand."
"You have me there!" said my mistress with a quick smile. "Well, I'll send you instead to report on the trial.... Meanwhile, telephone the personal ad. to the
Sphere
, will you? 'X: I'm on the job; Y.'"
I obeyed with many misgivings.
For the purpose of attending the trial, Mme. Storey furnished me with a bobbed brown wig, and an artistic-Bohemian outfit that suggested Greenwich village. It was not that we expected anybody in the court-room to recognise me, but we thought, seeing that I would be working on the case later, it would be just as well not to give any interested person the chance to remember having seen my conspicuous red hair at the trial.
General Sessions, part three, was sitting in one of the corner court-rooms in the Criminal Courts Building. I had had previous acquaintance with those big, ugly, ill-ventilated rooms which are equally stifling in summer or in winter. Justice is always associated in my mind with the smell of hot varnish and perspiring humanity. The case was not of the slightest public interest; and so far as I had seen was not even mentioned in the newspapers; nevertheless, the benches were well filled, which suited me very well.
Recorder Teague was on the bench. He enjoys a wide reputation for no reason that I can see, except that he
looks
the perfect justice, with his lovely white hair and mild gaze. I have seen him hand down some pretty raw decisions when his temper was exacerbated by the warring lawyers. But justices are only human. My case was not in progress when I entered the room. Various motions were being made in other cases, and the indifferent jury lolled in the box with their tongues out, one might say.
I saw several well-known persons in the court-room. Jim Shryock was sitting at the counsel table. The sight of that man always makes my bristles rise. I cannot understand how an honest community can tolerate such a parasite—much less heap honours and emoluments upon him. But there, I am one of the community myself, and I have never denounced him. He is a little, bald, fat man, with a sharp nose, and he seems to exude oily cunning at every pore. He is known as one of our leading criminal lawyers, and his services are in great demand, yet he can scarcely speak grammatical English. His success is not due to his powers of oratory, but to his command of deep and devious underground methods of political influence and graft. Everybody knows he's crookeder than the crooks he defends, but he continues to flourish like the green bay tree.
I also saw John McDaniels, the head of the well-known detective bureau. He was a burly Hercules, with a hard, closed face. Nobody could have mistaken him for other than a "bull." He prides himself on his taciturnity, and is supposed to be able to overawe criminals by his glare, and the turning of his cigar between his thick lips. We have been associated with him in several cases; opposed to him at other times; our general relations are friendly. Mme. Storey has no great opinion of his mental capacity; but he has achieved a considerable measure of success by dogged determination. His agency does a wide business.
When Melanie Soupert was called, I looked towards the prisoners' door with the keenest curiosity. I saw a handsome, dark-eyed girl enter the court-room with a toss of her black mane, and a defiant hand on her hip. That hand had been placed just so to display a showy bracelet with rhinestones. She stared at the spectators with insolent contempt. It was obvious that every detail of this entrance had been rehearsed. Poor little things! it is well that they are able to obtain some satisfaction out of their appearances in court!
A handsome girl, with regular features and a beautiful strong body. She was clad in a smartly tailored blue suit with a piquant little jacket. A true daughter of New York, her feet were expensively and unserviceably shod in brown suede slippers, daintily strapped and slashed. I knew that the price of such slippers would keep a poor family in food for a week. She wore no hat. Her hands were beautifully kept, and she displayed them.
I sought to pierce through her hard, defiant stare to what lay behind; but in vain, I could see nothing but a sort of childish vanity and braggadocio. Yet I knew there was something behind it, for I had had a peep into her heart through the medium of her letter. It was a disconcerting thought; I mean, that all the childish people we contemptuously put out of mind may have hearts. Melanie sat at the counsel table in the chair that was pointed out to her, and proceeded to powder her nose—though she had surely done it just before entering.
All through the tedious preliminaries I watched and weighed her, trying to solve the insoluble enigma of a human being. I received many impressions; some of them flatly contradictory. I had come there in no friendly state of feeling towards the girl, and she was deliberately trying to antagonise everybody who looked at her; nevertheless, little by little, she won me. Watching her, I was reminded of certain blind and painful periods in my childhood when I knew I was acting like a devil, and my heart was breaking.
I saw that she was not as young as I had at first thought. Fully twenty-six or twenty-seven. I saw that her hardness lay wholly in the deliberately assumed expression of her eyes. Her features were rather softly and sweetly formed. One could see, under different circumstances, that same face turning gentle and girlish. Her eyes were large, and very expressive; such eyes are accustomed to tenderness.
It struck me that there was something quite splendid in her spirit. Certainly her defiant attitude was nobler than the attitude of the usual accused woman, who looks poor and put upon, and ogles the jury with woe-begone eyes. I had the uncomfortable feeling—which has visited me before—that our life is only too prone to crush and destroy the really fine spirits among us, while it exalts the smug and the petty. In short, this girl, who wished to persuade everybody that she didn't give a damn, caused a good-sized lump to rise in my throat.
The preliminaries over, she pleaded not guilty, and the trial commenced in earnest. It made me thoughtful to observe that Jim Shryock was defending her. Shryock was a big figure in criminal practice, and it was well known that only such of the accused as had plenty of money, or were of political importance, might hope to secure his services. Melanie and Shryock stood side by side at the counsel table, but none of the usual communications passed between them. Apparently the girl's own lawyer was included in her general scorn.
Every trial is interesting. The very structure of a trial corresponds to that of a play on the stage, with the bringing in of the verdict for the grand climax. And a trial—even such an unimportant trial as this one—brings together such a curious
dramatis personæ
. There was that fascinating problem of a girl; there was Shryock, the sublimated shyster; there was McDaniels, the honest, dogged bully; there was Mrs. Cranstoun, whose pearl necklace had been stolen, an exquisite, artificial, inane little person; there was Recorder Teague with his ascetic, beautiful face, probably calculating how he could meet the monthly household accounts, while he made believe to be listening to the evidence; and finally, there was me, taking it all in, and trying to strike through to the mystery that I was assured lay behind this very ordinary case.
Mrs. Cranstoun was the first witness. Mrs. Cranstoun was one of those egregiously expensive little matrons who pose as "leaders." Leaders of what, God knows! There are so many of these leaders scattered up and down Park Avenue, one wonders where they can collect enough followers to go around. Mrs. Cranstoun stated that she was the owner of a necklace of seventy-eight matched pearls that was valued, roughly, at thirty thousand dollars. She was very careful of her things, she informed the court; never left them lying about; never trusted servants foolishly; and had never before had a loss.
She had had a replica of the necklace made, she said, and kept the real pearls in a safe deposit box. Since all her friends knew that she possessed a necklace of that value, she naively explained, it did just as much good to wear the artificial pearls around. But occasionally she had to get the real pearls out, because if they were not worn sometimes she had been told they would lose their lustre. On such occasions, she said, she visited the safe deposit vault without telling anybody of her intention, changed the artificial pearls for the real, wore the latter for a couple of days, then returned them to safe-keeping. She did not even tell her husband when she was wearing the real pearls. Nobody could have told except an expert in gems.
She went on to tell how she had engaged Melanie Soupert—but under the name of Rose Dawson, as a parlour-maid. She had advertised in the newspapers for a parlour-maid. No, that was not her usual custom. She obtained her servants through a high-class agency. But there was a shortage at this time; they sent her nobody, and she was forced to advertise. She liked the looks of the girl, who was very neat and polite. She could see from her hands, of course, that she was not accustomed to domestic service, but all kinds of people drift in and out of service, and she was thankful to get anybody. The girl offered her references, which she did not investigate as closely as she ought.
The prisoner had been working for her a few days, a week, perhaps, when she, Mrs. Cranstoun, had occasion to get her pearls out of the vault. No, she was perfectly sure she had told nobody of her intention. The chauffeur drove her to the bank, of course, but she went there often, and for many other reasons besides getting out the pearls. During the rest of that day she wore the real pearls. That night she and Mr. Cranstoun attended the Follies. Upon retiring for the night, she dropped the necklace in a jewel-box, on her dressing-table, which had no lock. It was part of her system to treat the real pearls, when she was wearing them, exactly the same as the artificial ones.
In the morning, when she went for them, she found them gone. Mrs. Cranstoun gave the jury a moving account of her emotions upon discovering her loss, while Recorder Teague's Adam's apple moved up and down with swallowed yawns. Mrs. Cranstoun telephoned to the police, and within half an hour a detective officer was sitting in her living-room. All the servants were rigorously quizzed—Melanie amongst the others—and their rooms searched, but nothing came of it. The parlour-maid answered up as cool as you please, and the officer did not suspect her. He said it was an outside job, and affected to discover finger-prints on the window-sill.
The prisoner remained on for five days after the theft. Then she dropped a valuable
sang de boeuf
vase, and smashed it. When Mrs. Cranstoun reprimanded her, she answered back pertly, and Mrs. Cranstoun discharged her on the spot. Looking back, she could see, of course, that the girl had smashed the vase on purpose to pave the way for her escape from the house.
Meanwhile, there was no word of the missing pearls, and despairing of getting any results from the police, Mrs. Cranstoun consulted Mr. McDaniels, who had been recommended to her by a friend whose jewels he had recovered. Several of her friends had consulted Mr. McDaniels upon one occasion or another, with entire satisfaction. And, indeed, when she described the discharged parlour-maid to him, he had immediately said: "Melanie Soupert." Within ten days Mr. McDaniels had recovered all her pearls from the various pawnshops where they had been pledged, and had secured the arrest of the girl.
While Mrs. Cranstoun was testifying, it was curious to see how she and Melanie sought to insult each other with exactly the same sort of glances of animal indifference. You know how women look at each other. In other words, the moral natures of accused and accuser were about the same; the difference between them was merely a matter of money. I never can understand this indifference of humans to humans. If a woman stole a pearl necklace from me I should be extraordinarily interested in her.
When Mrs. Cranstoun concluded her testimony, Jim Shryock arose and said: "No cross-examination." From the oily smile he bent upon the witness, one would have supposed that he was her lawyer.
This attitude of Shryock's was my first proof that this was not just an ordinary case. As the trial proceeded, he made it clear that he had no intention of exerting himself to get the girl off. From his cynical expression the jury might gather that the girl's guilt could be taken for granted. This made me very indignant. She was guilty, no doubt, but just the same she was not getting a fair trial. And the nerve of the super-shyster! He intended that everybody should see that he had abandoned the girl. It was absolutely unethical, of course, but such was the evil prestige of the man that nobody had the courage to call him.
The only other important witness was John McDaniels. An experienced witness, the big man was entirely matter-of-fact upon the stand. This was all in the day's work for him. He described the various steps he had taken to recover the pearls, and apprehend the girl, which I need not go into here. As soon as he heard Mrs. Cranstoun's tale, he suspected Melanie Soupert was the thief, because it was her speciality to engage herself as a parlour-maid and steal her mistress's jewels when the opportunity offered. One of the cleverest jewel thiefs in the business. Always worked single-handed. She possessed several genuine letters of recommendation from well-known women, which she had stolen or purchased from the real Rose Dawson.
McDaniels recited Melanie's criminal record with deadly particularity. She had first been arrested for stealing her mistress's jewels, when only seventeen years old. Had been sentenced to a reformatory, but being a first offender, and on account of her youth, had soon been parolled. Shortly afterwards she was back in the dock, charged with a similar crime; and this time she had received a prison sentence, which she had served, with the customary allowance off. Two years before, she had once more been arrested, and convicted of robbery, and had been sentenced to Woburn Prison for five years. After serving but a month or two, she had broken out of prison, and the unexpired sentence was still awaiting her at Woburn.