624
The Green Bag
"And yet, astonishingly foolish as that pretense was, the very folly of it grew into a point in his favor. The alibi he tried to set up was useless. It only accounted for his actions till midnight. The woman was mur dered at three in the morning. Once more the case becomes topsy-turvy. If he was the guilty man how could he have tried to set up so ridiculous an alibi} With the woman's blood hardly washed off his hands, with the sight of her body still blotting his eyes, with the remembrance still vivid in his mind of walking out from that haunting room into the cool silence of an autumn morning, would a guilty man's mind work and puzzle over the harmless hours between six and eleven the night before? Of course not.' It would be the morning hours that would be crying out to him. He would be trying to get away from the dawn, not from the night. "From one point of view it was perhaps in Wood's favor that throughout the trial he never seemed to realize that he was in danger. A guilty man could not be supposed to have such confidence. But what a curious, pitiful picture such a prisoner made in the witnessbox. Could anything be more baffling to counsel than his shortsighted prevarications, his quibbles, his dramatic attitudes, his apparently complete inability to understand that he must for his own sake, tell 'the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth'? At one time his concern seems to be to deny that he frequents public-houses, at another to repudiate acquaintances with loose women, at another to be unnecessarily polite; but not, first and foremost, to blurt out the truth. 'Did you kill Emily Dimmock?'—the blunt, straight-flung question demands a direct answer. 'It's ridiculous,' is the reply. 'Is Crabtree's evidence true?'—'I ask God to destroy me this moment if I have ever been in the house with Crabtree.' 'Have you been in the habit of using the "Rising Sun" '? 'I have lived in the neighborhood all my life, within a stone's throw of it. I may have gone there occasionally with a friend. I must be with a friend before I go to a public-house as a rule.' He is unable to see, apparently, how little it matters in the urgent, present case, a case of murder, whether he goes alone into a public-house or with a friend, 'as a rule.' Pressed on the most important point of all, as to why he was so anxious to cover up his doings on the Wednesday night, his reasons are more wrongheaded still. He had his people to consider; he had himself to consider, he
urges, unaware of the irony of the plea; he knew the 'Rising Sun' had a rather bad repu tation—he did not wish to hurt the pro prietor's feelings in saying so—and he thought it would be very unpleasant to be associated with such people. At intervals it is only with the greatest difficulty that he can be got to give a plain answer. He is shown a charred fragment of paper on which there are scraps of his writing. 'It has the appearance of a copy,' he assents, apparently thinking that his counsel does not want him to own the writing. His counsel reassures him: 'It is my handwriting,' he admits. For a moment, apparently, he had thought it might be unsafe to tell the truth. Yet all the while he is an innocent man, he knows himself to be inno cent and cannot understand that only the truth will help him to prove his innocence. "It may be that the law which allows an accused man to give evidence on his own be half has hanged as many criminals as it has helped. But what is unquestionable is that an innocent man determined to speak the absolute truth, concealing no single detail, even though this or that detail looks to him as if it were damning evidence against him, stands in an almost impregnable position. He may find himself making admission after admission which apparently tightens the rope around his neck; his own story may seem so unlikely as to be incredible. But he will never be shaken out of his story; and suddenly, perhaps by the oddest, most contradictory chance, light breaks in; his seemingly wild contention becomes probable, possibly be comes established and unquestionable by means of one of the very admissions which seemed to him likely to tell most against him. An innocent man telling the truth, indeed, is like a man crossing a cataract by a bridge of which the wood is apparently rotten in places, but is in reality strengthened and secured by a core of steel. His only chance of getting to the other side is going forward boldly. To distrust the planks is either to go back or in trying not to step on them, to slip into the river. In the case which has just ended there was more than one moment when the accused man looked like slipping; his counsel held him on his way, and the steel took him over. He may not come out of the case with an in creased respect for himself, but there is pos sibly no one who has followed the course of a very remarkable trial who has come out of it with a greater respect than he for the truth."
