That Royle Girl/Chapter 15
CHAPTER XV
"The State," said Calvin, at eleven o'clock in the morning of the ninth day, "the State rests, your Honor." And he turned slowly from the judge to the table of the defense.
Max Elmen had relapsed into his seat at the table with his elbows upon the bare board and with his big, bald head bowed between his hands in a devout posture of petition.
His hands hid his cheeks, his temples and his eyes, but left his mouth visible, and visibly his lips moved like the lips of a priest at solemn meditation. Calvin stared at him with surprised disgust; but since Calvin allowed the minimum of expression to his emotions, he seemed to most of the observers to be regarding his opponent merely in silence, and he served to direct the attention of every one to Elmen.
Perhaps Elmen spied out the situation from between his fingers, perhaps he was so confident of the effect of his posture that he had no need to prove it. He raised his head deliberately, keeping his eyes closed as though to prolong to the last moment his supplication and then deliberately he arose and turned, blinking at the light; and Calvin pricked with indignation as he perceived that Elmen was putting his pose "over."
For a moment again he closed his eyes, as though doubtful of the guidance given him during his meditation; then, apparently abandoning a plan of his own for another now imparted to him, he called Ketlar's mother from the witness room.
"Take the stand, please," Elmen said to Anna Folwell and whispered, as though only for her, but so that every one heard "for your boy's sake."
Anna Folwell looked straight into Elmen's eyes; from him she gazed straight into the eyes of her son, who turned to her; then Calvin found her gazing into his.
He turned and stepped back and sat down at his table beside Ellison and did not watch the witness again.
She was dressed in a black gown fitted to her figure, which was full in the bosom, small at the hips; her arms, in the closely fitted black sleeves, were graceful and slender. She had white linen cuffs set in the sleeves and a little line of white linen banded the black at her throat. Since she had taken off her hat, her yellow hair increased the contrast of her clear, white skin against the black of her dress.
Calvin looked at the jury and saw that she immediately elicited their interest, particularly that of two men of middle age who leaned forward as she took the seat upon the witness stand. Calvin glanced quickly at Elmen and caught his eye upon the middle-aged men in the jury box.
Elmen took a step nearer and spoke in a low tone, as though to prevent the audience from hearing, but his voice was clear and carried to the corners of the room, which was very quiet.
"What is your name, please?"
"My name is Anna Ketlar Folwell," the witness replied, in a low voice, which also was distinct. She was speaking very carefully, one word at a time and with a pause after each, when she pressed her lips tightly together.
"You are married?"
"Yes; I am married."
"You are also employed?"
"I have a list of ladies, whose hair I shampoo."
"When were you married?"
"I married John Folwell on the seventh of September, three years ago."
"Before that time, what was your name?"
"Anna Ketlar."
"That was your maiden name?"
"Yes."
"You had never been married before three years ago?"
Behind him, Calvin heard the shuffle of feet which told him that the people on the crowded benches were bending forward.
The jurymen bent closer to her, every man staring into her face, and a tinge of red mantled her cheek and throat.
"No," she replied, with her eyes steady upon her questioner's.
"You always found employment shampooing ladies' hair?" Elmen led on.
"No; I have done that only since I became older."
"When you were younger, what was your employment?"
"I was a manicurist in a hotel barber-shop."
"Are you related to the accused in this case?" asked Elmen.
"I am his mother."
"How old is he?"
"He was twenty-four years old on the twelfth day of last May," she replied, keeping her eyes and lips still steady, but her bosom relaxed and swiftly filled again with the gasp of her breathing.
"Where was he born?"
"In a rooming house on Indiana Avenue in Chicago."
"What name did you give him?"
"Frederic Ketlar."
"Your own surname, that is? You never gave him the name of his father?"
"I have never," she replied, and touched with her tongue her dry lips, "told to any one the name of his father."
"Has he ever seen his father?"
"Never," she said; then for the first time she looked away from Elmen and not at any one else, but gazed into memory, and for the first time her lips quivered.
"Do you wish to change that answer?" asked Elmen.
"Never to my knowledge," she said. "When Fred got his band a few years ago and was doing so well, I wrote his father that Fred Ketlar was his son and where he could see his son if he wished to. I do not know whether his father ever went to see him; my son could not have known his father if he faced him."
"Did his father ever reply to you?" asked Elmen.
"Get up!" ejaculated Ellison to Calvin, and when Calvin did not immediately respond, Ellison was on his feet. "I object, your honor!" he cried to the judge, and the witness was silent.
The judge waited, before ruling, and gazed at the State's attorneys; Calvin arose and, with Ellison, advanced toward the judge, with Elmen stepping beside them.
"Your honor, this question is irrelevant and immaterial," Ellison protested vigorously and turned to his associate to reënforce him.
"The State," said Calvin, slowly, "has made no point of the circumstances of the defendant's birth, much less of the relations between his parents. This is simply a play for sympathy—"
"To which, your honor," interrupted Elmen, eloquently, "the defendant is surely entitled. The learned counsel for the State have made no point of these circumstances because they are well aware that these be in our favor. I bring them out to show how my client, by his own talent and character, made himself famous and honorable from a most unfortunate beginning for which he can be held in no way to blame. Therefore, evidence to show the father's neglect of him is competent."
Calvin started back to his seat even before the judge ruled that the witness answer. "Never," she replied; and Calvin realized that the objection had served merely to increase sympathy for her and for her son.
"You brought up your son by yourself?" Elmen proceeded.
"Yes."
"You may relate to the jury incidents which you have observed and distinguishing traits to show his nature and character," said Elmen, facing for a moment the attorneys for the State, as though he anticipated another protest, "so that the jury may be aided to decide whether or not he was a boy likely to murder his wife and the mother of his child, as has been charged by the State."
"From the time when he was a very little boy," said Ketlar's mother, "he wanted to do all he could to help me by making money, running errands for patrons of the hotel . . . he begged the manager to employ him as a page when he was much younger than other boys. . . ."
Calvin listened and watched her, unwillingly, as she told of her son's boyhood.
". . . He always had a liking for music and wanted to be around when the orchestra was playing. . . . I missed him early one winter morning in the room where he slept on a couch. It wasn't his way to make me worry by going off, so I waited, and about four o'clock he came in. . . . He didn't know I'd missed him, and I didn't let him know I was awake. But the same thing happened next early morning. . . . Soon I found out.
"There was a basement restaurant, with a piano, which could be played without disturbing people who were asleep; Fred was down there playing at the piano when the scrubbers were cleaning up. By spring, that boy could play—fine; in a couple of years he could play anything—the violin or cornet or saxophone. He was just a natural genius, my little boy. The whole city heard about him and just flocked to hear him play and to see him, too, tossing his head in time to his music and smiling so. . . ."
Tears blurred her eyes, but she maintained better control of herself than did some of the jurymen, who wiped their eyes again and again.
Calvin ceased to watch her; he stared intently at a bit of paper which he had picked up and which he tore slowly and with minute care into tiny bits.
"At this time," asked Elmen of his witness, "how was he toward you? Did his attitude toward you change?"
"I'd never have worked in years if Fred had his way. I worked because I'd be lost without it, that was all. No, that wasn't quite all either," the witness corrected. "I guess the truth of it was that I worked because I couldn't believe way inside of me that what'd come to Fred—to my boy, born the way I've told you—could be true, gentlemen." She faced for the first time toward the jury. "Somebody or something would take him from me, I knew; not for anything he ever would do, not because he ever would be bad, but because I was bad, gentlemen, to get him. It was the fear in my heart that my joy in my son couldn't be given to me."
Silence, except for sobbing, ensued in the court-room. Calvin had torn his bits of paper until his finger tips could grasp them no more; so he collected the fragments, carefully in his palm, while his mind seemed incapable of operating rationally.
"The State," he heard in Elmen's voice, "the State may cross-examine this witness." And Calvin's mind began again to act, warning him that E!men's purpose in putting this woman first upon the stand was not only to start the defense with a tremendous emotional appeal, but to dangle bait before him for cross-examination. Most particularly had the manner of Ketlar's birth been exposed as bait at which Elmen would have the State's attorney strike in an attempt to discredit and besmirch the witness.
Besmirching must be done this day, Calvin knew; but the mother was not the one to take the first attack. How well Elmen would like it! Calvin glanced at Anna Folwell's face and realized that she sat there, hoping fort an assault upon her, in which she would offer herself as victim for the sake of her son.
At Calvin's side Ellison was stirring impatiently; for Elmen had sat down, and the judge and the jury were waiting upon the attorneys for the State.
Calvin quietly arose. "We have no questions," he said, and almost instantly he won confirmation of his belief that Elmen had built upon his taking the bait.
The hour of the morning was enough to prove it; for the clock hands stood at half past eleven, too early for adjournment and not early enough to allow unbroken presentation of the first and most important part of the testimony of the next witness.
Elmen recognized this; undoubtedly, indeed, he had taken it into consideration when he had called Ketlar's mother for his first witness; but he had been sure that the State would strike at the offered bait because it was a lure at which others so frequently had struck. Ellison, left to himself, would have attempted to turn some of this witness's testimony to the purpose of the prosecution. When Clarke refused there ran through Elmen's competent brain, within his big, bald head, the reproach that he himself had known very well that Assistant State's Attorney Calvin Clarke was different. Had he not even said so to Joan Daisy Royle?
He discerned, however, as he saw his opponent standing quietly, in his refusal to cross-examine, that he had not plumbed quite the full depth of the difference.
His witness looked at him and Elmen arose, smiling as if very well pleased. "Since the State does not venture to cross-question, that is all, Mrs. Folwell," he said. "You may step down," and Elmen advanced with elaborate courtliness, to give his hand to guide her; and immediately, as though it was as he had intended, he sent his chief witness to the stand.
Joan Daisy stepped up, alone, and repeated the oath in a low, excited whisper, and when she turned from the judge and faced the court-room she remained standing.
"You may sit down, Miss Royle," bid Elmen.
She put behind her the hand which she had just raised for the oath and, feeling the back of the chair, she seated herself cautiously.
"What is your name?" Max Elmen propounded in full, resonant voice which seemed visibly to sustain her.
She replied barely audibly; and Elmen repeated her name in sympathetic tones for such of the jury as might not have heard her.
"What is your present age, Joan Daisy?" he inquired.
"I'm twenty."
"She says she is twenty, gentlemen," announced Max, motioning with his hand like a showman in a gesture which irritated Calvin Clarke, but which wholly failed to offend the jury.
"And where have you spent your twenty years, Joan Daisy?" pursued Max pleasantly, indeed almost in jovial curiosity.
"Mostly I have lived in Chicago and I have lived also in Detroit, in Cleveland and in Milwaukee and several other cities."
"So?" ejaculated Max, agreeably simulating surprise, and by a little toss of his head as well as by the easy gesture of his hand he deliberately snapped the skein of strain which, by the help of the previous witness, he had woven over the court-room. Every one sat, no less attentively, but more comfortably—every one, that was, but the witness and Calvin Clarke.
"How have you lived in all these cities and in Chicago?" Max inquired of her.
"How?" repeated Joan Daisy, genuinely bewildered, as every one could see.
"I mean, have you lived alone; or perhaps—if the gentlemen of the State will not object to it as a leading question—perhaps with your parents?"
Joan Daisy emitted a little sigh, as she comprehended. "Oh, with my parents, always," she replied, very seriously.
Elmen cast at Calvin a casual look or, more exactly, a glance which pretended to be casual, but which fixed into a stare as though Elmen suddenly had discovered a peculiar idiosyncrasy which arrested him; and Calvin, in spite of himself, prickled with self-consciousness.
He became aware that he was sitting erect at his table, his hands held stiffly before him, his feet planted flat upon the floor; and as he felt Elmen's quizzical gaze, which now guided the eyes of the court-room, Calvin tried to think how to relax in order to appear at ease, but he could not. He burned with annoyance at himself and endured, in motionless awkwardness; and he berated himself for his relief when Elmen looked away.
Calvin's mind became cool again and informed him of the means by which Elmen planned to control the mood of the court-room. First, he had brought on the mother to found the defense upon powerful emotions over which Elmen now would play pleasanter and prettier sensations. His witness upon the stand was pretty and pleasant to look upon and appealing—oh, yes, appealing!
She was wearing a dress which Calvin had not seen before; undoubtedly it had been selected and purchased for the uses of this day. It was blue and opened like a coat with wide revers down the front; over the breast was a vestee of white, set just low enough to show the lovely white of her smooth throat and to suggest, without actually displaying, the rounding of her bosom. It was a plain dress and inexpensive, as any one could see, but the girl was charming in it.
The sleeves clung to her slender, lovely arms which were upon the arms of the big witness chair and her white, pretty hands clasped and unclasped the oaken support nervously.
Calvin watched her hands; as frequently as he dared he gazed into her face. Her head, her lovely head with white brow and the beautiful shaping behind it, she held up with the little tilt characteristic of her. She was frightened and confused; her own lawyer had confused her and intentionally; and she did not understand it. But to Calvin, Elmen's purpose was become plain.
Elmen, having drilled and rehearsed her in a long series of questions and answers, was confronted by the necessity of making question and answer appear original and natural to the jury, and the best way to accomplish this was to throw in a surprise question and require an unprepared answer. Only with a witness of exceptional intelligence and spirit would he venture on such a course, confident that she could resume her rehearsed answers when he resumed his prepared questions.
"You have lived all your life with your parents, you say, Joan Daisy," continued Elmen. "Have you also lived 'on' them?"
"I have been employed since I was twelve years old," replied Joan Daisy.
"Are you employed at present?"
"I am a stenographer employed by G. A. Hoberg of the Hoberg Construction Company."
"A private secretary, you said?" asked Max, bending forward quickly as though his ears, usually reliable, suddenly had betrayed him.
"I'm a stenographer," said Joan Daisy, and Max stared at her in bland admiration as though he had never heard such a confession before.
It was wholly an antic, but palpably it increased the liking for the witness; and Calvin, watching the jury, felt their pleasure in the performance. For Max Elmen confidently was staging a show; after having played upon their feelings, he gave them a pretty girl, teased her a little, perplexed her, preparing for the moment, always in anticipation, when he would draw from her intimacies titillating to women and to men.
Yet this was a trial for murder in a court of law! Law! Calvin thought, and his mind went, for an instant, to the Calvin Clarke who crossed the ocean nearly three hundred years before in the company of men bearing the first law and foundation of order to this continent; he thought of that Calvin in his cabin; of Timothy and of the Calvin who went to war with Knox, all giving their lives in the cause of law; of Jeremy of John Adams' administration and his sons and grandsons, all given to law which was become here, in the presence of Calvin Clarke in a Chicago court, a vehicle of entertainment.
A tall youth, beyond Max Elmen, arose and officiously moved about while Max was questioning. He stepped to the wall beyond the judge against which stood the pair of metal boxes, fitted with reflectors and equipped with lights, which the photographers had placed before the witness stand when they took pictures of the Royle girl previous to the opening of the trial. Now, with the judge in his seat, the jury in place, and while Elmen put his questions and the witness spoke her answers upon which might depend the life of the prisoner on trial, the tall youth bore the light boxes, one after the other, to a position in front of the witness stand. He gathered the cord-plugs and screwed them into light sockets on the wall and he cast upon the girl, in the witness chair, two beams of glaring light.
Meanwhile, a companion close by erected a tripod and placed upon it a motion-picture camera; he focused upon the witness, stooped and carefully inspected his subject in the ground-glass field and, satisfied, he straightened and set to turning his handle with its "click-click-click" while the witness, under the glare, testified in reply to Max Elmen's interrogations.
The judge ignored this entire proceeding; to be sure, a glaring beam, as a box was shifted, struck him in the eye and caused him to squint, but otherwise he took no notice whatever. The jury welcomed the glare, which gave them the girl for sharper and severer inspection.
Calvin kept his eyes upon the jury for the first moments and saw them examining the witness only more avidly; he searched in the double line of the jurors for the faces of the men whom most willingly he had accepted before his challenges were gone, and he saw every man of them staring at the witness with no sign of offense at the spotlights.
One juror, solely, sat back, consideringly; one seemed to keep his mind his own and not give it over to Max Elmen's antics; one looked on, externally, at the performance. Andreapolos, he was, the Greek whom Max Elmen had forced into the jury when Calvin had spent the State's challenges, and who had become foreman.
"Now," said Max Elmen, "you may tell us of your first meeting with the defendant in this case." And Calvin forgot the jury to himself gaze at the girl in the glare of the spotlights.
Glare supplied to Joan Daisy her sole physical sensation. First it was the glare of the noonday sun upon the snow, which shone into her eyes as she sat facing the windows; now the glare from the reflector-boxes became more blinding, but she succeeded in not squinting.
Max Elmen recently had concentrated his several injunctions into one great commandment: "Make them like you every minute." Whatever else she might do, this she must remember, and if she merely obeyed it she could not go far wrong. "You go upon the stand," explained Max, "to establish an alibi; the alibi is good only if they believe you; they will believe you if they like you. So that is all you have to do, but you must do it, make them like you every minute."
So when the glare blinded her, she knew she must not squint; for no one could like a girl with a squint.
An effect of the lights was to shut off sight of Max Elmen and his son Herman, of Ket and his mother and also of Assistant State's Attorney Calvin Clarke and that Mr. Ellison who sat beside him. It created the illusion of strangely removing her into a far recess of the courtroom into which Max Elmen's voice penetrated, borne upon the glare.
"Tell us of your first meeting with the defendant," said the loud but distant words; and, off by herself, Joan Daisy recollected how she had encountered Ket when she was twelve years old.
She fixed the event in her memory as having occurred a few months before Dads made his denial of paternity and before she went to work. Dads and mamma and she were at a hotel and, as usual, they were to leave the hotel, unceremoniously. While making their preparations, a boy was posted to watch in their rooms. He was about fifteen years old and a very nice looking boy and most embarrassed at his errand and extremely considerate of her. She remembered how very red his clear cheeks became and what very light hair he had. He and she spoke hardly a dozen words; but they studied each other, and both remembered the meeting years afterward, though she did not then know his name.
This, she had related to Max Elmen, and she remembered distinctly that he had planned to "use" it; he had prepared it for use, rehearsing her in question and answer. Then, so she recollected, he had decided not to use it, having turned to the opinion that the danger from it outweighed its obvious advantages, but later he had reconsidered and drilled her over the ground again. Yet now she doubted which answer he wanted. If she could see him clearly she would know, but she could scarcely see him at all, and she must answer.
"I met Fred Ketlar when I was twelve years old and when he was a bell-boy in a hotel here in Chicago."
"Obviously at that time no one could say that your association," Mr. Elmen started a sequence of familiar words and, precisely as he had drilled with her, he corrected himself and asked—"was there any sentimental feeling whatever between you and the lad at that time?"
"Why, no," replied Joan Daisy.
"What, if anything, served especially to direct your attention to him?" asked Max, and Joan Daisy guessed that she had remembered wrongly and that the last decision of Mr. Elmen had been to omit this episode; but since he had started it, he had to continue with it, and so must she. Accordingly she spoke into the glare the prepared reply, which detailed the lad's chivalrous care for her, as a child, upon an occasion which failed to hint of an eviction.
"When next did you meet him?" the remote voice proceeded swiftly, dismissing this original incident.
"Last September," replied Joan Daisy, settling with relief upon reaching an incident which could be related almost as it had occurred. The click-click-click of the camera was stopped, the gleaming lamps were switched off, and faces, shoulders, tables, rails and walls took on the hues of daylight and were clearly to be seen. For a few seconds, she felt let down, as though she had been upheld by a tonic quality in the glare.
"I met him on Wilson Avenue," continued Joan Daisy. "I had stopped before a show window, and he stopped and looked in beside me. I noticed him and he noticed me.
"'I've seen you somewhere before,' he said to me, when he saw I was trying to place him.
"'I've seen you,' I said.
"'I've got you now,' he said. 'You were a little kid and they were'—Joan Daisy almost repeated what Ket actually had said, which was, 'they were throwing you out of a hotel.' But she recollected a passage which she had rehearsed with Elmen and she substituted, 'they were with you'—he meant my father and mother—'in a hotel where I was bell-boy.'
"'That's where I knew you,' I said.
"'Do you know who you knew?' he asked. 'Do you know who I am?'
"'No,' I said.
"'I'm Ketlar of the Echo,' he told me, and it was just nice, he was so pleased.
"'Not that bell-boy!' I said.
"'That bell-boy!' he said. 'Now he's Fred Ketlar; that's me!'
"I tell you it thrilled me to think of that boy turning out to be Fred Ketlar!" And it thrilled Joan Daisy, as she told it, for this was true; this was exactly what had happened; that bell-boy, who had been nice to her when she was embarrassed and in trouble, had made himself the famous Fred Ketlar, who led the orchestra at the Echo, whose records every one played and whose music every one whistled and sang.
In front of her Mr. Clarke was standing—Mr. Clarke who had come for the People of Illinois to accuse Ket and to hang him; but Mr. Elmen, who also was upon his feet, stepped nearer to her and to the judge.
"Your honor," Mr. Elmen was saying, "it is essential to the defense to go with considerable detail into the relations between this witness and the defendant; her attitude toward him at all times is directly relevant and material, as will be shown."
The judge nodded, and Mr. Clarke could not prevent her telling how she felt about Ket.
"Did this end your conversation at the time?" Mr. Elmen asked, and Joan Daisy could discern that he was much pleased with her.
"No."
"You may relate whatever else passed between you, if you remember."
"I do," replied Joan Daisy, recognizing the cue to embark upon another series of prepared passages, which were not true; but she must repeat them, if she was to save Ket; and she felt that never had she wanted to save him so much as now when she faced Mr. Calvin Clarke, the ready-made from Harvard and from the home in Massachusetts which went back through Antietam and John Adams' administration to the Revolution and Queen Anne's war, and who sat watching her and taking notes which he would use to try to trip her in her effort to save the bell-boy, who had been born out of wedlock to a barber-shop manicurist, as all the court had heard, and who had made himself Fred Ketlar.
"He told me about his wife and child, then," testified Joan Daisy. 'Would you pick me for the father of a four-year-old girl?' he said to me. 'Well, I am. I got the greatest little girl in the world; sings all my songs, too!'"
"Do you remember what you said?" prompted Max Elmen.
"'I'd like to meet your wife,' I said. 'Make it a little later,' he said. 'We're keeping up separate flats for a while. By the way, the agent must have stuck silencers over the neighbors while he was renting me the dump I'm living in; now that I'm in I can't pound my own piano loud enough to hear it for the noise. Swell place to compose!'"
"You went to your home?" put in Max.
"Yes; we were walking along then . . . there was a 'for rent' sign in front of our building which advertised the special deadening of the floors and walls. He saw it and came in and looked at a flat; the people below were playing a record and he had me play the radio in the flat upstairs, and he listened in the flat between, and he took it."
"That was the flat just below your family's?" asked Max.
"Yes."
"This was all there was to his taking it?"
"Yes."
"He engaged it upon that first evening, before there could possibly be any development of attachment between you two?"
Mr. Clarke was upon his feet. "I object!"
"Sustained," ruled the judge.
Max Elmen, having delivered his inference, dutifully amended his question: "He engaged it upon that first evening?"
"Yes."
"When was the next time you saw him?"
"It was about a week later."
"A week?"
"A week," lied Joan Daisy.
"This was after he moved into the flat below you?"
"Yes."
"How long after?"
"Four or five days after," lied Joan Daisy, faithfully.
"Then after having moved into the flat below you, he made no effort to pursue you?"
"I object!" protested Mr. Clarke.
"Sustained," ruled the court.
"After Fred moved into the flat below you, did he make an effort to pursue you?" amended Max.
"No," Joan Daisy lied.
"You may relate to the jury the nature of your association with Fred Ketlar leading to his presence with you and with your father in your apartment upon the night when his wife was killed."
Joan Daisy turned to the jury, as Mr. Elmen had warned her to do whenever he specifically mentioned "jury"; she gazed at the men staring at her; she glanced at Mr. Clarke and she thought how impossible to tell the truth!
Suppose she risked it and related how Ket had leased the flat below hers for the sake of being near her; suppose she told how he had sought her and followed her, had made love to her, and how she had had to fight him off whenever they were alone and every moment watch him; why then they would believe that for her he had killed Adele. And he had not killed Adele. That Joan Daisy knew.
So she faced the jury and told them, prettily and unfalteringly, the prepared story of Ket's chivalrous friendship for her and her hope and ambition for him. The latter part, she related surpassingly well, because it was true; and, when launched upon the telling, she became inspired and passed beyond the bounds of that which she had rehearsed with Max Elmen and indeed beyond anything which she ever had imparted to Max, for she told to the jury her dream of Ket, great and honorable and with his name beside Wagner's and Mozart's on the stone front of the Chicago Orchestra building.
Not once during this telling did she look at Mr. Elmen, for she dared not. But when it was over she turned and sat back, trembling, but only to see Max Elmen's little eyes and his large lips smiling with approving delight.
"Your honor," said Max to the judge with huge satisfaction, "it is now the usual hour for adjournment. I suggest adjournment, therefore, in order to enter afresh into the vital and delicate matter next to come before us."