_ When Cowperwood came into the crowded courtroom with his father
and Steger, quite fresh and jaunty (looking the part of the shrewd
financier, the man of affairs), every one stared. It was really
too much to expect, most of them thought, that a man like this
would be convicted. He was, no doubt, guilty; but, also, no doubt,
he had ways and means of evading the law. His lawyer, Harper
Steger, looked very shrewd and canny to them. It was very cold,
and both men wore long, dark, bluish-gray overcoats, cut in the
latest mode. Cowperwood was given to small boutonnieres in fair
weather, but to-day he wore none. His tie, however, was of heavy,
impressive silk, of lavender hue, set with a large, clear, green
emerald. He wore only the thinnest of watch-chains, and no other
ornament of any kind. He always looked jaunty and yet reserved,
good-natured, and yet capable and self-sufficient. Never had he
looked more so than he did to-day.
He at once took in the nature of the scene, which had a peculiar
interest for him. Before him was the as yet empty judge's rostrum,
and at its right the empty jury-box, between which, and to the
judge's left, as he sat facing the audience, stood the witness-chair
where he must presently sit and testify. Behind it, already awaiting
the arrival of the court, stood a fat bailiff, one John Sparkheaver
whose business it was to present the aged, greasy Bible to be
touched by the witnesses in making oath, and to say, "Step this
way," when the testimony was over. There were other bailiffs--one
at the gate giving into the railed space before the judge's desk,
where prisoners were arraigned, lawyers sat or pleaded, the
defendant had a chair, and so on; another in the aisle leading to
the jury-room, and still another guarding the door by which the
public entered. Cowperwood surveyed Stener, who was one of the
witnesses, and who now, in his helpless fright over his own fate,
was without malice toward any one. He had really never borne any.
He wished if anything now that he had followed Cowperwood's advice,
seeing where he now was, though he still had faith that Mollenhauer
and the political powers represented by him would do something for
him with the governor, once he was sentenced. He was very pale
and comparatively thin. Already he had lost that ruddy bulk which
had been added during the days of his prosperity. He wore a new
gray suit and a brown tie, and was clean-shaven. When his eye
caught Cowperwood's steady beam, it faltered and drooped. He
rubbed his ear foolishly. Cowperwood nodded.
"You know," he said to Steger, "I feel sorry for George. He's
such a fool. Still I did all I could."
Cowperwood also watched Mrs. Stener out of the tail of his eye--
an undersized, peaked, and sallow little woman, whose clothes
fitted her abominably. It was just like Stener to marry a woman
like that, he thought. The scrubby matches of the socially unelect
or unfit always interested, though they did not always amuse, him.
Mrs. Stener had no affection for Cowperwood, of course, looking on
him, as she did, as the unscrupulous cause of her husband's downfall.
They were now quite poor again, about to move from their big house
into cheaper quarters; and this was not pleasing for her to
contemplate.
Judge Payderson came in after a time, accompanied by his undersized
but stout court attendant, who looked more like a pouter-pigeon
than a human being; and as they came, Bailiff Sparkheaver rapped
on the judge's desk, beside which he had been slumbering, and
mumbled, "Please rise!" The audience arose, as is the rule of all
courts. Judge Payderson stirred among a number of briefs that were
lying on his desk, and asked, briskly, "What's the first case, Mr.
Protus?" He was speaking to his clerk.
During the long and tedious arrangement of the day's docket and
while the various minor motions of lawyers were being considered,
this courtroom scene still retained interest for Cowperwood. He
was so eager to win, so incensed at the outcome of untoward events
which had brought him here. He was always intensely irritated,
though he did not show it, by the whole process of footing delays
and queries and quibbles, by which legally the affairs of men were
too often hampered. Law, if you had asked him, and he had accurately
expressed himself, was a mist formed out of the moods and the
mistakes of men, which befogged the sea of life and prevented plain
sailing for the little commercial and social barques of men; it
was a miasma of misinterpretation where the ills of life festered,
and also a place where the accidentally wounded were ground between
the upper and the nether millstones of force or chance; it was a
strange, weird, interesting, and yet futile battle of wits where
the ignorant and the incompetent and the shrewd and the angry and
the weak were made pawns and shuttlecocks for men--lawyers, who
were playing upon their moods, their vanities, their desires, and
their necessities. It was an unholy and unsatisfactory disrupting
and delaying spectacle, a painful commentary on the frailties of
life, and men, a trick, a snare, a pit and gin. In the hands of
the strong, like himself when he was at his best, the law was a
sword and a shield, a trap to place before the feet of the unwary;
a pit to dig in the path of those who might pursue. It was
anything you might choose to make of it--a door to illegal
opportunity; a cloud of dust to be cast in the eyes of those who
might choose, and rightfully, to see; a veil to be dropped arbitrarily
between truth and its execution, justice and its judgment, crime
and punishment. Lawyers in the main were intellectual mercenaries
to be bought and sold in any cause. It amused him to hear the
ethical and emotional platitudes of lawyers, to see how readily
they would lie, steal, prevaricate, misrepresent in almost any
cause and for any purpose. Great lawyers were merely great
unscrupulous subtleties, like himself, sitting back in dark,
close-woven lairs like spiders and awaiting the approach of unwary
human flies. Life was at best a dark, inhuman, unkind, unsympathetic
struggle built of cruelties and the law, and its lawyers were the
most despicable representatives of the whole unsatisfactory mess.
Still he used law as he would use any other trap or weapon to rid
him of a human ill; and as for lawyers, he picked them up as he
would any club or knife wherewith to defend himself. He had no
particular respect for any of them--not even Harper Steger, though
he liked him. They were tools to be used--knives, keys, clubs,
anything you will; but nothing more. When they were through they
were paid and dropped--put aside and forgotten. As for judges,
they were merely incompetent lawyers, at a rule, who were shelved
by some fortunate turn of chance, and who would not, in all
likelihood, be as efficient as the lawyers who pleaded before
them if they were put in the same position. He had no respect for
judges--he knew too much about them. He knew how often they were
sycophants, political climbers, political hacks, tools, time-servers,
judicial door-mats lying before the financially and politically
great and powerful who used them as such. Judges were fools, as
were most other people in this dusty, shifty world. Pah! His
inscrutable eyes took them all in and gave no sign. His only
safety lay, he thought, in the magnificent subtley of his own
brain, and nowhere else. You could not convince Cowperwood of any
great or inherent virtue in this mortal scheme of things. He knew
too much; he knew himself.
When the judge finally cleared away the various minor motions
pending, he ordered his clerk to call the case of the City of
Philadelphia versus Frank A. Cowperwood, which was done in a clear
voice. Both Dennis Shannon, the new district attorney, and Steger,
were on their feet at once. Steger and Cowperwood, together with
Shannon and Strobik, who had now come in and was standing as the
representative of the State of Pennsylvania--the complainant--had
seated themselves at the long table inside the railing which
inclosed the space before the judge's desk. Steger proposed to
Judge Payderson, for effect's sake more than anything else, that
this indictment be quashed, but was overruled.
A jury to try the case was now quickly impaneled--twelve men out
of the usual list called to serve for the month--and was then ready
to be challenged by the opposing counsel. The business of impaneling
a jury was a rather simple thing so far as this court was concerned.
It consisted in the mandarin-like clerk taking the names of all
the jurors called to serve in this court for the month--some fifty
in all--and putting them, each written on a separate slip of paper,
in a whirling drum, spinning it around a few times, and then lifting
out the first slip which his hand encountered, thus glorifying
chance and settling on who should be juror No. 1. His hand reaching
in twelve times drew out the names of the twelve jurymen, who as
their names were called, were ordered to take their places in the
jury-box.
Cowperwood observed this proceeding with a great deal of interest.
What could be more important than the men who were going to try him?
The process was too swift for accurate judgment, but he received
a faint impression of middle-class men. One man in particular,
however, an old man of sixty-five, with iron-gray hair and beard,
shaggy eyebrows, sallow complexion, and stooped shoulders, struck
him as having that kindness of temperament and breadth of experience
which might under certain circumstances be argumentatively swayed
in his favor. Another, a small, sharp-nosed, sharp-chinned commercial
man of some kind, he immediately disliked.
"I hope I don't have to have that man on my jury," he said to
Steger, quietly.
"You don't," replied Steger. "I'll challenge him. We have the
right to fifteen peremptory challenges on a case like this, and
so has the prosecution."
When the jury-box was finally full, the two lawyers waited for the
clerk to bring them the small board upon which slips of paper bearing
the names of the twelve jurors were fastened in rows in order of
their selection--jurors one, two, and three being in the first row;
four, five, and six in the second, and so on. It being the
prerogative of the attorney for the prosecution to examine and
challenge the jurors first, Shannon arose, and, taking the board,
began to question them as to their trades or professions, their
knowledge of the case before the court, and their possible prejudice
for or against the prisoner.
It was the business of both Steger and Shannon to find men who knew
a little something of finance and could understand a peculiar
situation of this kind without any of them (looking at it from
Steger's point of view) having any prejudice against a man's trying
to assist himself by reasonable means to weather a financial storm
or (looking at it from Shannon's point of view) having any sympathy
with such means, if they bore about them the least suspicion of
chicanery, jugglery, or dishonest manipulation of any kind. As
both Shannon and Steger in due course observed for themselves in
connection with this jury, it was composed of that assorted social
fry which the dragnets of the courts, cast into the ocean of the
city, bring to the surface for purposes of this sort. It was made
up in the main of managers, agents, tradesmen, editors, engineers,
architects, furriers, grocers, traveling salesmen, authors, and
every other kind of working citizen whose experience had fitted
him for service in proceedings of this character. Rarely would
you have found a man of great distinction; but very frequently a
group of men who were possessed of no small modicum of that
interesting quality known as hard common sense.
Throughout all this Cowperwood sat quietly examining the men. A
young florist, with a pale face, a wide speculative forehead, and
anemic hands, struck him as being sufficiently impressionable to
his personal charm to be worth while. He whispered as much to
Steger. There was a shrewd Jew, a furrier, who was challenged
because he had read all of the news of the panic and had lost two
thousand dollars in street-railway stocks. There was a stout
wholesale grocer, with red cheeks, blue eyes, and flaxen hair, who
Cowperwood said he thought was stubborn. He was eliminated. There
was a thin, dapper manager of a small retail clothing store, very
anxious to be excused, who declared, falsely, that he did not
believe in swearing by the Bible. Judge Payderson, eyeing him
severely, let him go. There were some ten more in all--men who
knew of Cowperwood, men who admitted they were prejudiced, men who
were hidebound Republicans and resentful of this crime, men who
knew Stener--who were pleasantly eliminated.
By twelve o'clock, however, a jury reasonably satisfactory to
both sides had been chosen. _