An American Tragedy - Theodore Dreiser [444]
But, ah, how shabby, false, fleeting, insincere. To imagine that any God would bother with a person who sought to dicker in such a way. No, no. That was not right either. What would the Rev. McMillan think of him if he knew what he was thinking?
But again there was the troubling question in his own mind as to his real guilt—the amount of it. True there was no doubt that he had plotted to kill Roberta there at first—a most dreadful thing as he now saw it. For the complications and the fever in connection with his desire for Sondra having subsided somewhat, it was possible on occasion now for him to reason without the desperate sting and tang of the mental state that had characterized him at the time when he was so immediately in touch with her. Those terrible, troubled days when in spite of himself—as he now understood it (Belknap’s argument having cleared it up for him) he had burned with that wild fever which was not unakin in its manifestations to a form of insanity. The beautiful Sondra! The glorious Sondra! The witchery and fire of her smile then! Even now that dreadful fever was not entirely out but only smoldering— smothered by all of the dreadful things that had since happened to him.
Also, it must be said on his behalf now, must it not—that never, under any other circumstances, would he have succumbed to any such terrible thought or plot as that—to kill any one—let alone a girl like Roberta—unless he had been so infatuated—lunatic, even. But had not the jury there at Bridgeburg listened to that plea with contempt? And would the Court of Appeals think differently? He feared not. And yet was it not true? Or was he all wrong? Or what? Could the Rev. McMillan or any one else to whom he would explain tell him as to that? He would like to talk to him about it—confess everything perhaps, in order to get himself clear on all this. Further, there was the fact that having plotted for Sondra’s sake (and God, if no one else, knew that) he still had not been able to execute it. And that had not been brought out in the trial, because the false form of defense used permitted no explanation of the real truth then—and yet it was a mitigating circumstance, was it not—or would the Rev. McMillan think so? A lie had to be used, as Jephson saw it. But did that make it any the less true?
There were phases of this thing, the tangles and doubts involved in that dark, savage plot of his, as he now saw and brooded on it, which were not so easily to be disposed of. Perhaps the two worst were, first, that in bringing Roberta there to that point on that lake—that lone spot—and then growing so weak and furious with himself because of his own incapacity to do evil, he had frightened her into rising and trying to come to him. And that in the first instance made it possible for her to be thus accidentally struck by him and so made him, in part at least, guilty of that blow—or did it?—a murderous, sinful blow in that sense. Maybe. What would the Rev. McMillan say to that? And since because of that she had fallen into the water, was he not guilty of her falling? It was a thought that troubled him very much now—his constructive share of guilt in all that. Regardless of what Oberwaltzer had said there at the trial in regard to his swimming away from her—that if she had accidentally fallen in the water, it was no crime on his part, supposing he refused to rescue her,—still, as he now saw it, and especially when taken in connection with all that he had thought in regard to Roberta up to that moment, it was a crime just the same, was it not? Wouldn’t God—McMillan—think so? And unquestionably, as Mason had so shrewdly pointed out at the trial, he might have saved her. And would have too, no doubt, if she had been Sondra—