Only seven were hanged
at this stage, to make a protest and a suggestion. I have never
understood the justice of putting a _suspected_ person in the dock,
for the fundamental principle of penology and law is that an accused
person is innocent until he is proved guilty. It follows, then, that
until the verdict is given the accused is technically innocent. Do
you agree?"
"Technically, yes, but----"
"Never mind the 'but.' You lawyers are constantly admitting
arguments and then inserting a 'but.' The plain truth is that a
suspected person has no legal or logical right in the dock. He is
presumably innocent. I hold--and I am not alone in this--that just
as the state has its public prosecutor so the accused person ought to
have the services of a public defender. Do you agree?"
"I am afraid----" began the judge, cautiously, and the waiter waved
his hand contemptuously.
"Of course you are afraid."
"I am not afraid!" snarled the judge, angrily, his temper fanned to
flaming condition.
"But you said you were!"
"I am not!"
"Be careful. You say now that you are not afraid. Yet it is not a
moment since you said you were afraid. Which is it to be?"
"I have told you. I am not afraid--not in the sense you mean."
"How do you know what sense I mean? Tell me how you are not afraid."
"I am afraid"--and the judge stopped and smashed his fist
tempestuously on the table, baited to active resentment and his
temper now well alight, furious at having contradicted himself,
raging at the misconstruction put on his words and anxious to recover
from the vindictive pressure of the waiter--"I am afraid, sir, that I
do not feel called upon to explain why I am not afraid."
"Pray be calm," said the waiter, patiently, assuming an affectation
of aggrieved innocence of all baiting intentions. "If you do not
feel able to answer a plain question, or if you are afraid, as you
have admitted, that you cannot tell me why you are not afraid, will
you then confess at once why you are afraid you cannot tell me why
you are not afraid?"
"I decline to reply to foolish questions," cried the exasperated
judge, his face crimson.
"Very well. But I warn you that the responsibility may be grave if
you persist in that attitude."
The judge turned his head away and pretended to become engrossed in
the ceiling.
A silence ensued that might have been interminable had not the judge,
after a while, happened to drop his eyes. To his astonishment, he
saw the waiter doing his best to stifle laughter by holding his
handkerchief over his mouth. But his eyes were brimming with
suppressed mirth and his hand was holding his side.
"Ah, judge," he cried, taking his handkerchief from his face, "you do
not make a very good witness for the defense!"
"What do you mean?" growled the judge.
"Merely that you now know what a poor devil of a prisoner, or
witness, feels like when a counsel roasts him in cross-examination.
I have seen you yourself take a delight in the game. How do you like
it now you see it from another viewpoint?" And the waiter put his
handkerchief to his face again and went into a paroxysm of laughter.
The judge did not deign to answer this unseemly taunt. He was more
than ever convinced that the waiter was mad; but at the same time he
wished that he had come out of the cunningly planned ordeal in a
different fashion.
"I observe," he said, coldly, "that you make no defense of the crime
of Nathaniel Gore. Perhaps you have no defense and so try to hide
the fact under a camouflage of boisterous, if rather forced, mirth."
The waiter controlled his features and pocketed his handkerchief.
"Pardon me," he retorted, with gravity, "it is you who are adopting
an old legal trick. Having no case to present, it is the custom to
slang the opposite side. How long will it take you to get it into
your head that I am not acting for the defense? I am prosecuting."
"Then I shall be glad to hear your prosecution of the law that hanged
Nathaniel Gore," remarked the judge drily. "I recited the case to
prove that execution did in fact act as a deterrent. I would merely
add that since Gore was hanged, as he deserved to be, there has never
been an attempt to steal diamonds brought from abroad by ships. If
that is not deterrent, then I do not know the meaning of the word."
"And so you expect to make use of the antidote in this flask and
recall one of your members back to consciousness? I would be the
first to admit your right to the claim if I thought it was reasonable
and beyond controversy. But it does not happen to be so. As for
your failure to see the reason of my mirth, that is quite
understandable. Few prisoners, or witnesses, do relish the laughter
in court that judges indulge in, with counsel as good supports, but
which they suppress in anybody else. Their sense of humor is not the
same. How can a prisoner be expected to enjoy a joke when the
discussion giving rise to it involves his chance of life?"
All trace of levity had now disappeared from the waiter's manner. He
was once more the serious person the judge desired him to be.
"And while I have mentioned executions," continued the waiter, "let
me bring to your notice the remarkable methods that penal codes adopt
in order to carry out the judgment of death. Each country has its
own particular form of procedure. In England the method is hanging,
in France it is the guillotine, in some states in America it is the
electric chair. There has been some discussion of late as to which
is the most humane way of killing criminals guilty of murder. The
guillotine is said to be at least the swiftest, if it is the most
bloody. England claims that hanging is the surest. In those states
in America where hanging is adopted there is a difference in the
mechanism of the scaffold. The American way is to have a heavy
weight to jerk the condemned man into the air instead of the usual
drop used in England. But this weight method raised a considerable
protest in Connecticut when a bandit was jerked into the other world.
It was held to be barbaric.
"England's claim is not altogether well founded, either. There was a
case some time ago where a man had to endure three successive
attempts to hang him by the drop method, none of which was
successful. Can you wonder that the officials present were filled
with disgust?
"As for the electric-chair method, it is held to be barbaric in the
extreme. It is not an electric chair at all, except in name. The
prisoner has to be strapped into it. He walks to it in an old suit
of black generously provided by the state. His funeral clothes. How
edifying and gentle is civilization! Behold, too, the paradox of one
of the wardens of a famous prison where executions are carried out
actually making it known that personally he is against the death
penalty! Poor man, he has his job to consider.
"We have had a parallel to this expression of opinion in England.
The late Major Blake, at one time governor of Pentonville prison, who
saw a number of executions, confessed that the whole thing sickened
him. '_I cannot help asking myself,_' to quote his exact words,
written after he had ceased to be a governor, '_why, when one was
called upon to superintend an execution one should have been affected
with such a keen sense of personal shame.... There must be something
fundamentally wrong with a law which has the effect of lessening the
self-respect of those whose duty it is to carry it out._'
"And, by the way, how many advocates of the judgment of death would
be willing to carry out the sentence? Is not it true that, according
to law, the sheriffs ought to do the deed? Why, then, pay a hangman
to do the thing they shrink from? Not so long ago a chief warder at
Wandsworth prison, in London, committed suicide because of the
haunting memories of the executions at which he had assisted. Ah,
that emblem of death, the black cap, which you don with
self-confessed satisfaction, your lordship, is no mere emblem of
retribution focused on the victim alone!"
The judge frowned, but did not interrupt, though he was sorely
tempted to. He wanted to claim his point and restore one of his
members to life.
The waiter seemed to read his thoughts, for without more ado he began
to state his third case.
THE PASSIONATE CRIME
Though you did not sentence Walter Seale to death [said the waiter],
you will find his crime mentioned in your minute-book. You may not
have been present at the meeting at which your fellow members [and he
made an eloquent gesture toward the unconscious men] discussed his
case and came to the conclusion that he also justly deserved to be
executed. As in every case that has come up before the erudite Clue
Club, all members have been entirely unanimous in their conclusions.
Walter Seale has been chosen for presentation because his criminal
act fits in very appropriately at this juncture. Have you not
related the case of The Mole, that representative of a base stratum
of the social cosmos? Is not it quite fitting, then, that a
representative of another stratum should be paraded whose sentence
and crime were in the same category so far as the penal code judged?
After all, The Mole was a criminal who warred on society so that he
might live. Walter Seale---- But you shall hear his story.
When Seale had thought out his plan to the last detail he went to the
Criminals' Rescue Guild, saying that his sympathies were entirely
with them in their difficult work, and asked if they could provide
him with a valet.
He was given a choice of several men who had served considerable
terms of imprisonment for various offenses. One was an ex-forger;
one was an ex-"confidence" man; one was a habitual convict; one had
spent many years making himself a proficient burglar. There were
others, all men who had reformed after having paid the penalties of
their evil-doing. Walter Seale chose Adam Jelks, the ex-burglar.
"We do not wish to hide from you the fact that occasionally we are
bitterly disappointed in those we try to help," was the candid
admission of the secretary of the guild, "but we believe that all the
men you have seen are honestly making an endeavor to go straight. At
the same time, in taking them as employes, employers are accepting
them at their own risk; but the men have asked for jobs, and if
treated fairly they generally prove worthy of the trust. I am quite
sure that Adam Jelks will turn out a good servant. If you have any
complaint, please let us know."
Walter Seale thereupon took Adam Jelks into his employ as valet in
the small bachelor flat he rented in the West End.
What Walter Seale, however, did not tell the Criminals' Rescue Guild
was that he had not come to give a man a chance to build up a new and
honest career, but he had come to choose a man whose past would aid
him to commit a crime if the crime he contemplated was necessary; and
he wanted a man who, without knowing it, would be his best defense, a
sure shield against suspicion falling on Mr. Seale when and if
suspicion fell at all.
For several weeks Adam Jelks did his duty as valet with a willingness
that no employer could question or find fault with. He took pains to
show that he was worthy of his hire, that he was desirous of being
able to face the world again. He was a young man, considerably
younger than Walter Seale; and Seale was not much over thirty years.
Jelks had a small bedroom at the flat. He had one whole day and one
half-day off every week. He was treated well. He responded to the
good treatment by giving good service.
One afternoon, when Jelks was engaged in polishing the silver in his
kitchenette, Walter Seale called to him to come at once. Jelks
hastened into the sitting-room. Seale was busy with a few