The United States court-room had been closed ever since court adjourned in May, but when it was thrown open for the hearing of the case against Dillon and Mason and the rest, it was immediately imbued with the atmosphere of federal authority. This atmosphere, cold, austere and formal, smote Marriott like a blast the moment he pushed through the green baize doors.
The great court-room was furnished in black walnut; the dark walls immediately absorbed the light that came through the tall windows. On the wall behind the bench was an oil portrait of a former judge; Marriott could see it now in the slanting light--the grave and solemn face, smooth-shaven, with the fine white hair above it, expressing somehow the older ideals of the republic. On the wall, laureled Roman fasces were painted in gilt. The whole room was somber and gloomy, suggesting the power of a mighty government poised menacingly above its people; there were hints of authority and old precedents in that atmosphere.
The reason the room held this atmosphere was that the judge who ordinarily sat on the bench had been appointed to his position for life, and there were no real checks on his power. For twenty years before he had been appointed this man had been the attorney for great corporations, had amassed a fortune in their promotion and defense, and, as a result, his sympathies and prejudices were with the rich and powerful. He knew nothing of the common currents and impulses of humanity, having never been brought in contact with the people; the almost unlimited power he wielded, and was to wield until he died, made him, quite naturally, autocratic, and he had impressed his character on the room and on all who held official positions there. The clerks, commissioners and assistant prosecutors whom he appointed imitated him and acquired his habits of thought, for they received his opinions just as they received his orders.
Marriott sat at the table and waited, and while he waited looked about. He looked at Wilkison, the commissioner; the judge had appointed him to his place; the amount of fees he received depended entirely on the number of cases the district attorney and his assistants brought before him; consequently, there being two commissioners, he wished to have the good will of the district attorney, and always reached decisions that would please him.
Dalrymple, the assistant district attorney, was a good-looking young man with a smooth-shaven, regular face that might have been pleasant, but, because of his new importance, it now wore a stern and forbidding aspect. He was dressed in new spring clothes; the trousers were rolled up at the bottoms, showing the low tan shoes which just then had come again into vogue. He wore a pink flannel shirt of exquisite texture; on this flannel shirt was a white linen collar. This combination produced an effect which was thought to give him the final touch of aristocracy and refinement. When he was not talking to Wilkison or to Fallen, he was striding about the court-room with his hands in his trousers pockets. Once he stopped, drew a silver case from his pocket and lighted a cigarette made with his monogram on the paper.
Marriott turned from Dalrymple with disgust; he looked beyond the railing, and there, on the walnut benches, sat Gibbs, with a retinue that made Marriott smile. They must have come in when Marriott was preoccupied, for he was surprised to see them. Gibbs sat on the end of one bench, as uncomfortable and ill at ease as he would have been in a pew at church. He was shaved to a pinkness, his hair was combed smooth, and he was very solemn. Marriott could easily see that the atmosphere of the court-room oppressed and cowed him; he had lost his native bearing, and had suddenly grown meek, humble and afraid. Marriott knew none of the others; there were half a dozen men, none of them dressed as well as Gibbs, with strange visages, marked by crime and suffering, all the more touching because they were so evidently unconscious of these effects. The heads ranged along the bench were of strange shapes, startlingly individual in one sense, very much alike in another. They were all solemn, afraid to speak, bearing themselves self-consciously, like children suddenly set out before the public. On one bench sat a young girl, and something unmistakable in her eyes, in her mouth, in the clothes she wore--she had piled on herself all the finery she had--told what she was. Her toilet, on which she had spent such enormous pains, produced the very effect the womanhood left in her had striven to avoid.
Marriott smiled, until he detected the deep concern which Gibbs was trying to hide; then his heart was touched, as the toilet of the girl had touched it. Marriott knew that these people were the witnesses by whom Gibbs expected to establish an alibi for Dillon and Squeak and Mandell; the sight of them did not reassure him; he had again that disheartening conviction of the utter lack of weight their appearance would carry with any court; he did not credit them himself, and he began to feel a shame for offering such witnesses. He was half decided, indeed, not to put them forward. But his greater concern came with the thought of Mason, whom he believed to be innocent; where, he suddenly wondered, was the reporter Wales?
But just at this moment the green baize doors of the court-room swung inward and suddenly all the people in the court-room--Dalrymple, Fallen, Wilkison, Marriott, Gibbs, the clerks and the reporters, the bailiff and the group Gibbs had brought up with him from the under world--forgot the distinctions and prejudices and hatreds that separated them, yielded to the claims of their common humanity and became as one in the eager curiosity which concentrated all their interest on the entering prisoners.
They came in a row, chained together by handcuffs, in charge of deputy marshals. They were marched within the bar, still wearing the hats they could not remove. The United States marshal himself and another deputy came forward and joined the deputies in charge of the prisoners. The officers took off their hats for them, and when they took chairs at the table, stood close beside them, as if to give the impression that the prisoners were most dangerous and desperate characters, and that they themselves were officials with the highest regard for their duty.
Wilkison, with great deliberation, was seating himself at the clerk's desk. Ordinarily he held hearings in an anteroom, but as this hearing would be reported in the newspapers he felt justified in using the court-room; besides, he could then test some of the sensations of a judge.