5. On the night of the shooting, what motive prompted Jerry to fling the pistol far over the edge of the bluff?
6. Describe the effects which the tragedy produced upon the garrison.
7. What were Jerry’s feelings during the days immediately succeeding the tragedy?
8. How does the reader decide the question as to who is the really guilty person?
PERJURED
Edith Ronald Mirrielees is a member of the English Department of Leland Stanford Junior University.
It was a useless lie. Robbins knew that, as soon as he had spoken it. But it stopped the boys' teasing. Once spoken, events followed in too rapid succession for him to do more than qualify his statement; the bald accusation remained. Repetition had done more than confirm the story in Sutro; it had benumbed Robbins’s own sense of exactness. His reputation for truth constantly confronted him; sometimes it made it easier for him, but increasingly often he saw the difficulty of reconciling the lie with himself. On the other hand, time and self-torture strengthened the conviction that truth must prevail and that no innocent man could suffer by the law. And so it proved. Robbins, the boy who had tried to save himself from momentary discomfiture, who had deliberately placed a man in direct accusation for murder, found himself, not a self-righteous person who by a last act of grace redeems the innocent and places himself on a martyr’s pedestal; instead, he found himself a perjured youth, no better than the truck-gardener Emerson in whom truth itself lost credence.
That a malignant fate had placed the name of the guilty man in the boy’s mouth, comes with no shock; the author has so carefully prepared our minds for that very verdict, that we are merely surprised that we could have forgotten the bits of telling evidence. The interest begins and ends with a boy of sixteen who in weakness was forsworn.
Suggested Points for Study and Comment