The Accused, Harold R. Daniels [read out loud books txt] 📗

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the accused, Alvin Morlock, is charged with the ultimate crime, the crime of murder. It is the intention of the State to demonstrate, in the course of this trial, that he is guilty and that the degree of his guilt, which it will be your function to fix, demands the ultimate punishment by law. In other words, we charge him with murder in the first degree. Murder calculated. Murder premeditated. Murder ruthlessly and heartlessly committed on the person who had every reason to expect nothing but a cherishing affection from the accused.

The defense will undoubtedly attempt to arouse your sympathy by attacking the character of the victim of his homicide, Morlock’s dead wife. They will tell you that she was extravagant, that she was a slattern and worse. But we will show you that Morlock himself was at least partly responsible for his wife’s actions, and I would impress on you that whatever his motives for murder, they in no sense mitigate his guilt. It is not the dead Louise Morlock who is on trial here. It is her husband, and the charge against him is the taking of a human life.

*

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts vs. Alvin Morlock. Opening remarks of Prosecution Attorney Gurney.

Morlock’s tenement was the second floor rear of an old sandstone mansion. Once it had been a stately house, handsome in the dignity of spotless windows and immaculate grounds. On an April afternoon he hurried toward its shelter, head bent against the wind that buffeted his slender body. On other days he had felt almost sorry for the house, humiliated now by pigeon droppings and candy wrappers, by discarded cigarette packages and empty bottles that had once held cheap wine and now gleamed dully in the barren hedge. Today he was concerned only with his personal humiliation.

He hurried up the warped stairs to the tenement and let himself in. The door opened from the hall directly into the kitchen, a shabby room with a chromium dinette set looking out of place against oak wainscoting. There was a scattering of dirty dishes on the table. A plate of margarine had half melted into a greasy yellow pool and the bitter smell of reboiled coffee was in the air.

Morlock called, “Lolly?” There was no answer. Lolly—the name which had once denoted affection—now choked in his throat. She was probably downstairs, he decided, and walked into the living room. There was a desk in the room that he used for his own work. She used a drawer in a cheap end table for her correspondence. Morlock opened the drawer and took out an untidy stack of envelopes.

She had made no effort to conceal the mess she had made of their finances. The letters were all there. A slim pile from a department store._ Will you please remit? A_ thicker pile from the appliance store that Morlock had just left. He read through them swiftly. Polite, at first, then insistent. Some of them quite clever in the manner in which they expressed dismay that a trusted customer could so badly disillusion them. From the gas and electric companies there were past-due notices but no letters. They hardly had to dun, Morlock reflected ruefully.

He sat wearily at his own desk after he had gone through the correspondence. In the last hour, the thought that he owed almost eight hundred dollars which he had promised to pay by morning had recurred to him a half dozen times, but with no lessening of its impact. He was stunned, overwhelmed by the personal disaster that had had its beginning only this morning when the hall monitor brought him a note from Dean Gorham requesting that he come to the Dean’s office immediately.

Morlock had been discussing the minor British poets for the benefit of a bored and listless class in English III when the summons came. After he read it, he had felt no particular alarm although the summons was out of the ordinary. He was not a good instructor; he knew that. He also knew that he was good enough for Ludlow College. He stood up and called to William Cory to monitor the class.

In a class of louts Cory was the most loutish. In an undergraduate body seemingly more callow and less purposeful than any Morlock had ever instructed, Cory was the most callow. He was not the least purposeful, though, for Cory was apparently dedicated with fanatic zeal and boundless patience to bullying his instructors to the point of mute and hopeless exasperation. Those he could not bully he attacked with seemingly inane questions that had viciously calculated double meanings, with false naivete, and with brutal behind-the-back pantomime.

Cory was older and bigger than most of his classmates. He was attending Ludlow under the provisions of the GI Bill and this was his protection. The college’s financial structure was shaky; the students attending under the Bill were the difference between bankruptcy and a threadbare solvency. There was an awareness of this among the instructors and consequently the Corys were tolerated. Morlock, in turning the class over to Cory in his absence, tried to convince himself that he was adopting the policies of the history instructor, Dodson.

“Give the bad ones responsibility,” Dodson contended when the instructors were talking shop. “Maybe it will teach them some common sense. If it doesn’t it will keep them out of your hair for a while anyway.”

Morlock, watching Cory shamble up the aisle, knew that his purpose in picking Cory for monitor had not been the hope of instilling common sense but was based instead on an admission that he feared Cory, and that Cory could embarrass him if he chose, because of that fear.

Cory loomed up beside the desk, a hulking, square-faced man of twenty-three with a lingering rash of acne on his cheekbones. His eyes were green and small, his teeth already in poor condition. He affected a varsity sweater and denim jeans. The cuffs of the sweater were shiny with dirt and grease. Morlock turned his head aside to avoid the smell of perspiration and of underwear not often enough changed.

“Alla right, teach’—I got it,” Cory said in a ridiculous imitation of an Italian immigrant. As he spoke, he looked toward the class expectantly. Looking for his laugh, Morlock supposed. Getting it, too. The watching faces grinned or smirked dutifully.

Once, in the hall, Morlock moved more hurriedly. He was a gray man—gray suit, gray eyes, light brown hair already starting to retreat from his high forehead. A worried man now that he had time to consider the possible implications of Dean Gorham’s note.

Dean Gorham had a receptionist, a part-time student worker, young and pretty in a plaid skirt and cardigan sweater. She motioned Morlock into the inner office when he entered the Dean’s suite, and he glanced down at her to see if he could read anything in her expression that might give him a clue to the nature of the crisis that had pulled him away from his class. If there was anything at all in her expression, it was the sort of contempt that Morlock was accustomed to seeing on the faces of the student body, and it probably had no relationship to the present circumstance. He hurried past her and into Dean Gorham’s office. ‘

Morlock had some respect for Gorham as a scholar. Gorham, however, was a big, imposing figure of a man with a Roman profile. His statesmanlike stature had led to his being pushed into administrative assignments where he would be available for public display almost from the time he qualified as a teacher; so that his scholarship had drowned in a tide of paper, leaving him harried and unhappy. He looked up uneasily as Morlock came into the room.

“You, Alvin,” he said fussily. “Close the door, won’t you, and take a chair.”

Morlock, not speaking, pulled up a leather covered chair from against the wall and sat down.

Gorham stood up and walked toward the window, where he stood looking out toward the meager campus with his hands clasped behind his back. He coughed once, started to speak and stopped, and finally turned back toward Morlock.

“This is very embarrassing,” he began again. “I don’t like to meddle in my teachers’ affairs. I don’t think I ever have with you, have I?”

Morlock—he had a growing and horrible suspicion now about the reason for Gorham’s summons—said, “No, sir.”

Gorham beat one fist lightly into the open palm of his other hand. “Maybe it would be easier if you read this,” he said. He picked up a letter from his desk and handed it to Morlock.

Morlock said, “Excuse me,” before he began reading. The letter was addressed to Gorham in his official capacity as Dean.

Sir, it read.

This is to call your attention to a situation which we feel you will wish to deal with personally in order to avoid undesirable publicity. A teacher at Ludlow, Mr. Alvin Morlock, is very much in arrears in his payments on several appliances purchased by him from us on our time contract plan. Repeated letters to Mr. Morlock have gone unanswered. Before taking legal action we are taking this means of attempting to reach an agreement as to prompt payment by Mr. Morlock. We shall appreciate hearing from you on this matter without delay.

The letter bore the heading of a local appliance store. When he had finished it, Morlock’s reaction was shameful embarrassment. He wished for a moment that he were dead—anything rather than be in this room with Gorham and his own humiliation. He mumbled, “I didn’t know, Dean Gorham. There must be some mistake.”

Gorham snatched at the straw eagerly. “Of course. Of course,” he agreed. “Those things do happen.” While Morlock listened dumbly, he began to relate some anecdote about a bank deposit he had himself made which had been credited to the wrong account. There had been no mistake. He knew it and he was certain that Gorham knew it. The Dean was, in his way, trying to restore his dignity, as if his own self-respect had dwindled because he had been forced to shatter Morlock’s.

Gorham, from a sense of duty, continued, “Of course, being teachers we are very vulnerable, Alvin. Caesar’s wife, you know,” he added with heavy-handed good humor. The Dean sat down behind his desk. “You’ve been married three months or so, isn’t it?”

Morlock nodded.

Gorham said, “I thought so. Of course, there are expenses involved in setting up a household and sometimes it is difficult. At the same time, we must be very careful to avoid things like this, particularly since the college’s own situation—” He continued hastily, “Of course, in this case it is a mistake. Clerical error probably. You’ll take care of it then?”

Morlock rose. “This afternoon,” he said. He turned and would have left the room but Gorham called to him.

“Alvin. I don’t have much but if I can help—”

The unexpected kindness shook Morlock more deeply than his shame had. He tried to speak and could not. Instead he shook his head and rushed from the room, past the receptionist and down the hall to his own classroom. He paused to regain his poise before he entered the room; when he did