"How much money had you about you when you left your father?"
"Twenty-five silbergroschen, as well as I can remember."
"And had you any prospect of obtaining anywhere a permanent position?"
"None."
"You had no such prospect, had but twenty-five silbergroschen in your possession, were anxious that your father should send you off, and yet you persist in asserting that your meeting on that same evening with the man who took you at once into his house, and with whom you stayed until the final catastrophe, was purely accidental! You are sharp enough to see how extremely improbable this is; and I now ask you for the last time, if, at the risk of casting the strongest suspicions on your veracity, you still persist in that statement?"
"I do."
Justizrath Heckepfennig cast a look at Actuary Unterwasser as much as to say: Can you conceive such impudence? Actuary Unterwasser smiled compassionately, and sadly shook his head, and scratched away with his pen over his paper, as if his shocked moral sense found some relief in getting such inconceivable things at all events down in black and white.
Thus it went on with I do not know how many interrogations and examinations; summary examination, examination in chief, articular examination. Often I could not tell what they were aiming at, and what was the object of all the long-winded interrogatories, and short cross-questions, in which last Justizrath Heckepfennig considered himself particularly great. I complained bitterly of this to my counsel, Assessor Perleberg, saying that I had told--or, as they preferred to express it, confessed--everything to the gentlemen.
"My dear sir," said the assessor, "in the first place it is not true that you have confessed everything. For instance, you have refused to say who was the person whom caller Semlow saw, about four o'clock on the evening in question, with you on the path leading to Zehrendorf. And in the second place, what is confession? In criminal jurisprudence it has but a very subordinate value. How many criminals cannot be brought to confess at all? and how many confessions are false, or are afterwards recanted? The real object of the examination is the detection of guilt. Consider, my dear sir, your entire so-called confession might be a fabrication. It has often happened before, the criminal record--"
It was enough to drive a man desperate. Years after, my counsel became a great beacon and luminary of jurisprudence; and indeed he was such at that time, though he was not then a professor, a privy-councillor, and a man of wide reputation, but an obscure assessor of the superior court, a very learned man, and of wonderful acuteness--a world too learned and too acute for a poor devil like me. With his "in the first place," and "in the second place," he would have prejudiced a jury of angels against innocence herself, to say nothing of a college of learned judges who could not avoid the conclusion that a man whose defence required so extraordinary an expenditure of learning and acumen, must of necessity be a very great criminal. I can still see him sitting on the end of the table in my cell, which was fastened with iron clamps to the wall, jerking his long, thin legs, and flourishing his long, thin arms, like a great spider who finds a broken mesh in his web. It was probably a hard task for so learned a spider, into whose web a clumsy blue-bottle had blundered and was floundering about in his awkward way, to extricate him with scientific nicety. And now for the first time I began to find out how far-spreading this web was, and how many flies, besides myself, were entangled in its meshes.