It is always insufficient to be innocent of a given charge. You must appear so. Annandale did not. Alternately he was bored and buoyant. But not dejected, never depressed. He did not seem to feel that his life was at stake. That is the attitude of the habitual ruffian. But sentiment was veering. Public opinion is a wave that thinks, thinks again, changes its mind, volatile as a woman. At the opening everybody knew that Annandale was guilty. Now nobody was quite so sure.
The Recorder caressed his beard. “I think,” he announced, “that I will give the jury a recess.”
IX
The Twelfth Juror
Tumultuously the session was resumed. At the door was a riot. There a squad of police fought back surging nondescripts clamoring for admission, fighting for entrance to the continuous show. A woman fainted. Another had her gown torn off. One man retired with a blackened eye.
During the recess Orr got for a moment with Sylvia and Mrs. Waldron. “Aren’t you hungry?” he asked.
Sylvia took his hand and pressed it. In her eyes was victory, in her face delight. “I never knew before how Protean you are. You have won.”
Orr tossed his head. “Not by a long shot. Besides, there is the jury. Eleven look imbecile and the twelfth looks ill. There is no telling at all what they will do or will not. But aren’t you to eat anything?” He turned to Mrs. Waldron. “Aren’t you hungry?”
“Very,” said the lady, “but I can’t do a thing with Sylvia. I—”
She would have said more, but the jury had filed in. The judge was entering, preceded by the cry “Hats off!”
Orr slipped back to his corner, to which Annandale, with his matinee air and the keeper for usher, had already returned. For a moment Orr bent to him, then to his associates but briefly. Bending again to Annandale he told him to take the stand.
The move, wholly unexpected, unusual, almost exceptional in murder cases, created an impression that was excellent, a sense of admiration for the fearlessness of the defense. From the prosecution came low growls of content. They were to be fed at last. In anticipation they licked their chops.
But the excellence of the impression dwindled. In the direct, Annandale denied, of course, that he had committed the murder, denied that he had ever contemplated it, swearing that to the best of his recollection he had made no threat at all.
“To the best of your recollection,” Orr repeated after him. “Now please tell me, had anything occurred that night to impair your memory in any way?”
“Well—er—yes. Yes. I had been drinking.”
“Had you any animosity toward the deceased?”
“Toward Loftus? None whatever. On the contrary, he was my best friend.”
Peacock jumped. “I ask that that be stricken out.”
Quietly Orr continued: “Had you known Loftus long?”
“All my life.”
“Was he a friend of yours?”
“An intimate friend.”
Orr turned to Peacock. “Your witness.”
Peacock jumped again. “You say that on the night of the murder you had been drinking. Were you drunk?”
Paternally the Recorder looked over and down. “The witness need not answer that unless—”
Annandale interrupted him. “I am much obliged to Your Honor, but really I have nothing to conceal. I was drunk, deplorably so.”
“Habit of yours, is it?” Peacock snapped.
Annandale took a monocle from a pocket, screwed it in his eye, looked through it at Peacock, smiled at him, with an air of fathomless good fellowship, answered: “Dear me, no. Is it one of yours?”
“Oho!” cried Peacock, pocketing the insult but pouncing at the point, “you were drunk on this occasion only. Got drunk for it, did you?”
“No,” Annandale blandly and confidentially replied. “You see, don’t you know, it was the day of the panic. I had dropped a good lot of money—a good lot, I mean, for me—and, as the saying is, I tried to drown my sorrows.”
“But you found that they could swim, didn’t you? Now, tell me, among these sorrows was not the greatest the one to which your former butler has testified, your late wife’s desire for a divorce in order that she might marry Loftus? Is it not a fact that she told you so, and that you then said, ‘I’ll kill him, I’ll kill Royal Loftus like the dog that he is’?”
“I recall no such conversation.”
“What, then, was the nature of the conversation that passed between you and your wife on this particular evening?”
“I don’t remember.”
“The conversation and the threat to which your butler has sworn may therefore have occurred without your now recalling it. Is that not so?”
“Everything is possible, you know,” Annandale answered with a phrase unconsciously borrowed of Orr. “But I doubt it very much for the reason—”
“Here,” interrupted Peacock. “I don’t want your doubts or your reasons or your haha airs. I want answers from you, direct answers. Where did you go and what did you do after your threat?”
To this Orr objected. A wrangle ensued. Orr was sustained. Peacock reconstructed his question. Annandale answered that he had gone to Miss Waldron’s, but that he remembered nothing else.
“Is this yours?” Peacock suddenly asked, producing the pistol marked exhibit A.
“Probably,” said Annandale, looking, not at it, but at the ceiling.
“That’s all.”
Annandale got from the stand. Others succeeded him there, experts for the defense, men who recited their qualities and degrees as though they were eating truffles to the sound of trumpets. One after another they testified that liquor can ablate memory partially, wholly; can ablate it regarding events antecedent and subsequent to a rememorated point between; can, moreover, leave
