An American Tragedy - Theodore Dreiser [340]
“Well, he won’t pull that one,” replied Jephson, his hard, electric, blue eyes gleaming, “not if I have to go to Kansas City to find out.”
And Belknap went on to tell Jephson all that he knew about Clyde’s life up to the present time—how he had worked at dishwashing, waiting on table, soda-clerking, driving a wagon, anything and everything, before he had arrived in Lycurgus—how he had always been fascinated by girls—how he had first met Roberta and later Sondra. Finally how he found himself trapped by one and desperately in love with the other, whom he could not have unless he got rid of the first one.
“And notwithstanding all that, you feel a doubt as to whether he did kill her?” asked Jephson, at the conclusion of all this.
“Yes, as I say, I’m not at all sure that he did. But I do know that he is still hipped over this second girl. His manner changed whenever he or I happened to mention her. Once, for instance, I asked him about his relations with her—and in spite of the fact that he’s accused of seducing and killing this other girl, he looked at me as though I had said something I shouldn’t have— insulted him or her.” And here Belknap smiled a wry smile, while Jephson, his long, bony legs propped against the walnut desk before him, merely stared at him.
“You don’t say,” he finally observed.
“And not only that,” went on Belknap, “but he said, ‘Why, no, of course not. She wouldn’t allow anything like that, and besides,’ and then he stopped. ‘And besides what, Clyde,’ I asked. ‘Well, you don’t want to forget who she is.’ ‘Oh, I see,’ I said. And then, will you believe it, he wanted to know if there wasn’t some way by which her name and those letters she wrote him couldn’t be kept out of the papers and this case—her family prevented from knowing so that she and they wouldn’t be hurt too much.”
“Not really? But what about the other girl?”
“That’s just the point I’m trying to make. He could plot to kill one girl and maybe even did kill her, for all I know, after seducing her, but because he was being so sculled around by his grand ideas of this other girl, he didn’t quite know what he was doing, really. Don’t you see? You know how it is with some of these young fellows of his age, and especially when they’ve never had anything much to do with girls or money, and want to be something grand.”
“You think that made him a little crazy, maybe?” put in Jephson.
“Well, it’s possible—confused, hypnotized, loony—you know—a brain storm as they say down in New York. But he certainly is still cracked over that other girl. In fact, I think most of his crying in jail is over her. He was crying, you know, when I went in to see him, sobbing as if his heart would break.”
Meditatively Belknap scratched his right ear. “But just the same, there certainly is something to this other idea—that his mind was turned by all this—that Alden girl forcing him on the one hand to marry her while the other girl was offering to marry him. I know. I was once in such a scrape myself.” And here he paused to relate that to Jephson. “By the way,” he went on, “he says we can find that item about that other couple drowning in The Times-Union of about June 18th or 19th.”
“All right,” replied Jephson, “I’ll get it.”
“What I want you to do tomorrow,” continued Belknap, “is to go over there with me and see what impression you get of him. I’ll be there to see if he tells it all to you in the same way. I want your own individual viewpoint of him.”
“You most certainly will get it,” snapped Jephson.
Belknap and Jephson proceeded the next day to visit Clyde in jail. And Jephson, after interviewing him and meditating once more on his strange story, was even then not quite able to make up his mind whether Clyde was as innocent of intending to strike Roberta as he said, or not. For if he were, how could he have swum away afterward, leaving her to drown? Decidedly it would be more difficult for a jury than for himself, even, to be convinced.
At the same time, there was that contention of Belknap