Chapter 13

"You know the Hepplewhite house up on Fifth Avenue--that great stone one with the driveway?"

The Tutts nodded.

"Well, it appears that the prisoner--our prospective client--was snooping round looking for something to eat and found that the butler had left the front door slightly ajar. Filled with a natural curiosity to observe how the other half lived, he thrust his way cautiously in and found himself in the main hall--hung with tapestry and lined with stands of armor. No one was to be seen. Can't you imagine him standing there in his rags--the Weary Willy of the comic supplements--gazing about him at the _objets d'art_, the old masters, the onyx tables, the statuary--wondering where the pantry was and whether the housekeeper would be more likely to feed him or kick him out?"

"Weren't any of the domestics about?" inquired Tutt.

"Not one. They were all taking an afternoon off, except the third assistant second man who was reading 'The Pilgrim's Progress' in the servants' hall. To resume, our friend was not only very hungry, but very tired. He had walked all the way from Yonkers, and he needed everything from a Turkish bath to a manicuring. He had not been shaved for weeks. His feet sank almost out of sight in the thick nap of the carpets. It was quiet, warm, peaceful in there. A sense of relaxation stole over him. He hated to go away, he says, and he meditated no wrong. But he wanted to see what it was like upstairs.

"So up he went. It was like the palace of 'The Sleeping Beauty.' Everywhere his eyes were soothed by the sight of hothouse plants, marble floors, priceless rugs, luxurious divans--"

"Stop!" cried Tutt. "You are making me sleepy!"

"Well, that's what it did to him. He wandered along the upper hall, peeking into the different rooms, until finally he came to a beautiful chamber finished entirely in pink silk. It had a pink rug--of silk; the furniture was upholstered in pink silk, the walls were lined with pink silk and in the middle of the room was a great big bed with a pink silk coverlid and a canopy of the same. It seemed to him that that bed must have been predestined for him. Without a thought for the morrow he jumped into it, pulled the coverlid over his head and went fast asleep.

"Meanwhile, at tea time Mrs. De Lancy Witherspoon arrived for the week-end. Bibby, the butler, followed by Stocking, the second man, bearing the hand luggage, escorted the guest to the Bouguereau Room, as the pink-silk chamber is called."

Mr. Bonnie Doon, carried away by his own powers of description, waved his hand dramatically at the old leather couch against the side wall, in which Weary Willy was supposed to be reclining.

"Can't you see 'em?" he declaimed. "The haughty Bibby with nose in air, preceding the great dame of fashion, enters the pink room and comes to attention, 'This way, madam!' he declaims, and Mrs. Witherspoon sweeps across the threshold." Bonnie Doon, picking up an imaginary skirt, waddled round Mr. Tutt and approached the couch. Suddenly he started back.

"Oh, la, la!" he half shrieked, dancing about. "There is a man in the bed!"

Both Tutts stared hard at the couch as if fully expecting to see the form of Weary Willy thereon. Bonnie Doon had a way of making things appear very vivid.

"And sure enough," he concluded, "there underneath the coverlid in the middle of the bed was a huddled heap with a stubby beard projecting like Excalibur from a pink silk lake!"

"Excuse me," interrupted Tutt. "But may I ask what this is all about?"

"Why, your new case, to be sure," grinned Bonnie, who, had he been employed by any other firm, might have run the risk of being regarded as an ambulance chaser. "To make a long and tragic story short, they sent for the watchman, whistled for a policeman, telephoned for the hurry-up wagon, and haled the sleeper away to prison--where he is now, waiting to be tried."

"Tried!" ejaculated Mr. Tutt. "What for?"

"For crime, to be sure," answered Mr. Doon.

"What crime?"

"I don't know. They'll find one, of course."

Mr. Tutt swiftly lowered his legs from the desk and brought his fist down upon it with a bang.

"Outrageous! What was I just telling you, Tutt!" he cried, a flush coming into his wrinkled face. "This poor man is a victim of the overzealousness which the officers of the law exhibit in protecting the privileges and property of the rich. If John De Puyster Hepplewhite fell asleep in somebody's vestibule the policeman on post would send him home in a cab; but if a hungry tramp does the same thing he runs him in. If John De Puyster Hepplewhite should be arrested for some crime they would let him out on bail; while the tramp is imprisoned for weeks awaiting trial, though under the law he is presumed to be innocent. Is he presumed to be innocent? Not much! He is presumed to be guilty, otherwise he would not be there. But what is he presumed to be guilty of? That's what I want to know! Just because this poor man--hungry, thirsty and weary--happened to select a bed belonging to John De Puyster Hepplewhite to lie on he is thrown into prison, indicted by a grand jury, and tried for felony! Ye gods! 'Sweet land of liberty!'"

"Well, he hasn't been tried yet," replied Bonnie Doon. "If you feel that way about it why don't you defend him?"

"I will!" shouted Mr. Tutt, springing to his feet. "I'll defend him and acquit him!"

He seized his tall hat, placed it upon his head and strode rapidly through the door.

"He will too!" remarked Bonnie, winking at Tutt.

"He thinks that tramp is either a statesman or a prophet!" mused Tutt, his mind reverting to his partner's earlier remarks.

"He won't think so after he's seen him," replied Mr. Doon.

It sometimes happens that those who seek to establish great principles and redress social evils involve others in an involuntary martyrdom far from their desires. Mr. Tutt would have gone to the electric chair rather than see the Hepplewhite Tramp, as he was popularly called by the newspapers convicted of a crime, but the very fact that he had become his legal champion interjected a new element into the situation, particularly as O'Brien, Mr. Tutt's arch enemy in the district attorney's office, had been placed in charge of the case.

It would have been one thing to let Hans Schmidt--that was the tramp's name--go, if after remaining in the Tombs until he had been forgotten by the press he could have been unobtrusively hustled over the Bridge of Sighs to freedom. Then there would have been no comeback. But with Ephraim Tutt breathing fire and slaughter, accusing the police and district attorney of being trucklers to the rich and great, and oppressors of the poor--law breakers, in fact--O'Brien found himself in the position of one having an elephant by the tail and unable to let go.

In fact, it looked as if the case of the Hepplewhite Tramp might become a political issue. That there was something of a comic side to it made it all the worse.

"Holy cats, boys!" snorted District Attorney Peckham to the circle of disgruntled police officers and assistants gathered about him on the occasion described by the reporters as his making a personal investigation of the case, "Why in the name of common sense didn't you simply boot the fellow into the street?"

"I wish we had, counselor!" assented the captain of the Hepplewhite precinct mournfully. "But we thought he was a burglar. I guess he was, at that--and it was Mr. Hepplewhite's house."

"I've heard that until I'm sick of it!" retorted Peckham.

"One thing is sure--if we turn him out now Tutt will sue us all for false arrest and put the whole administration on the bum," snarled O'Brien.

"But I didn't know the tramp would get Mr. Tutt to defend him," expostulated the captain. "Anyhow, ain't it a crime to go to sleep in another man's bed?"

"If it ain't it ought to be!" declared his plain-clothes man sententiously. "Can't you indict him for burglary?"

"You can indict all day; the thing is to convict!" snapped Peckham. "It's up to you, O'Brien, to square this business so that the law is vindicated--somehow It must be a crime to go into a house on Fifth Avenue and use it as a hotel. Why, you can't cross the street faster than a walk these days without committing a crime. Everything's a crime."

"Sure thing," agreed the captain. "I never yet had any trouble finding a crime to charge a man with, once I got the nippers on him."

"That's so," interjected the plain-clothes man. "Did you ever know it was a crime to mismanage a steam boiler? Well, it is."

"Quite right," agreed Mr. Magnus, the indictment clerk. "The great difficulty for the perfectly honest man nowadays is to avoid some act or omission which the legislature has seen fit to make a crime without his knowledge. Refilling a Sarsaparilla bottle, for instance, or getting up a masquerade ball or going fishing or playing on Sunday or loitering about a building to overhear what people are talking about inside--"

"That's no crime," protested the captain scornfully.

"Yes, it is too!" retorted Mr. Magnus, otherwise known to his fellows as Caput, because of his supposed cerebral inflation. "Just like it is a crime to have any kind of a show or procession on Sunday except a funeral, in which case it's a crime to make a disbursing noise at it."

"What's a disbursing noise?" demanded O'Brien.

"I don't know," admitted Magnus. "But that's the law anyway. You can't make a disbursing noise at a funeral on Sunday."

"Oh, hell!" ejaculated the captain. "Come to think of it, it's a crime to spit. What man is safe?"

"It occurs to me," continued Mr. Magnus thoughtfully, "that it is a crime under the law to build a house on another man's land; now I should say that there was a close analogy between doing that and sleeping in his bed."

"Hear! Hear!" commented O'Brien. "Caput Magnus, otherwise known as Big Head, there is no doubt but that your fertile brain can easily devise a way out of our present difficulty."

"Well, I've no time to waste on tramp cases," remarked District Attorney Peckham. "I've something more important to attend to. Indict this fellow and send him up quick. Charge him with everything in sight and trust in the Lord. That's the only thing to be done. Don't bother me about it, that's all!"

Meantime Mr. Hepplewhite became more and more agitated. Entirely against his will and, so far as he could see, without any fault of his own, he suddenly found himself the center of a violent and acrimonious controversy respecting the fundamental and sacred rights of freemen which threatened to disrupt society and extinguish the supremacy of the dominant local political organization.

On the one hand he was acclaimed by the conservative pulpit and press as a public-spirited citizen who had done exactly the right thing--disinterestedly enforced the law regardless of his own convenience and safety as a matter of principle and for the sake of the community--a moral hero; on the other, though he was president of several charitable organizations and at least one orphan asylum he was execrated as a heartless brute, an oppressor of the poor, an octopus, a soulless capitalist who fattened on the innocent and helpless and who--Mr. Hepplewhite was a bachelor--probably if the truth could be known lived a life of horrid depravity and crime.

Indeed there was a man named Tutt, of whom Mr. Hepplewhite had never before heard, who publicly declared that he, Tutt, would show him, Hepplewhite, up for what he was and make him pay with his body and his blood, to say nothing of his money, for what he had done and caused to be done. And so Mr. Hepplewhite became even more agitated, until he dreamed of this Tutt as an enormous bird like the fabled roc, with a malignant face and a huge hooked beak that some day would nip him in the abdomen and fly, croaking, away with him. Mrs. Witherspoon had returned to Aiken, and after the first flood of commiserations from his friends on Lists Numbers One, Two, Three and Four he felt neglected, lonely and rather fearful.

And then one morning something happened that upset his equanimity entirely. He had just started out for a walk in the park when a flashy person who looked like an actor walked impudently up to him and handed him a piece of paper in which was wrapped a silver half dollar. In a word Mr. Hepplewhite was subpoenaed and the nervous excitement attendant upon that operation nearly caused his collapse. For he was thereby commanded to appear before the Court of General Sessions of the Peace upon the following Monday at ten a.m. as a witness in a criminal action prosecuted by the People of the State of New York against Hans Schmidt. Moreover, the paper was a dirty-brown color and bore the awful name of Tutt. He returned immediately to the house and telephoned for Mr. Edgerton, his lawyer, who at once jumped into a taxi on the corner of Wall and Broad Streets and hurried uptown.

"Edgerton," said Hepplewhite faintly as the lawyer entered his library, "this whole unfortunate affair has almost made me sick. I had nothing to do with the arrest of this man Schmidt. The police did everything. And now I'm ordered to appear as a witness! Why, I hardly looked at the man. I shouldn't know him if I saw him. Do I have to go to court?"

Mr. Edgerton smiled genially in a manner which he thought would encourage Mr. Hepplewhite.

"I suppose you'll have to go to court. You can't help that, you know, if you've been subpoenaed. But you can't testify to anything that I can see. It's just a formality."

"Formality!" groaned his client. "Well, I supposed the arrest was just a formality."

Mr. Edgerton smiled again rather unconvincingly.

"Well, you see, you can't always tell what will happen when you once start something," he began.

"But I didn't start anything," answered Mr. Hepplewhite. "I had nothing to say about it."

At that moment Bibby appeared in the doorway.

"Excuse me, sir," he said. "There is a young man outside who asked me to tell you that he has a paper he wishes to serve on you--and would you mind saving him the trouble of waiting for you to go out?"

"Another!" gagged Mr. Hepplewhite.

"Yes, sir! Thank you, sir," stammered Bibby.

Mr. Hepplewhite looked inquiringly at Mr. Edgerton and rose feebly.

"He'll get you sooner or later," declared the lawyer. "A man as well known as you can't avoid process."

Mr. Hepplewhite bit his lips and went out into the hall.

Presently he returned carrying a legal-looking bunch of papers.

"Well, what is it this time?" asked Edgerton jocosely.

"It's a suit for false imprisonment for one hundred thousand dollars!" choked Mr. Hepplewhite.

Mr. Edgerton looked shocked.

"Well, now you've got to convict him!" he declared.

"Convict him?" retorted Mr. Hepplewhite. "I don't want to convict him. I'd gladly give a hundred thousand dollars to get out of the--the--darn thing!"

Which was as near profanity as he had ever permitted himself to go.

* * * * *

Upon the following Monday Mr. Hepplewhite proceeded to court--flanked by his distinguished counsel in frock coats and tall hats--simply because he had been served with a dirty-brown subpoena by Tutt & Tutt; and his distress was not lessened by the crowd of reporters who joined him at the entrance of the Criminal Courts Building; or by the flashlight bomb that was exploded in the corridor in order that the evening papers might reproduce his picture on the front page. He had never been so much in the public eye before, and he felt slightly defiled. For some curious reason he had the feeling that he and not Schmidt was the actual defendant charged with being guilty of something; nor was this impression dispelled even by listening to the indictment by which the Grand Jury charged Schmidt in eleven counts with burglary in the first, second and third degrees and with the crime of entering his, Hepplewhite's, house under circumstances not amounting to a burglary but with intent to commit a felony, as follows:

"Therefore, to wit, on the eleventh day of January in the year of our Lord one thousand nine hundred and nineteen in the night-time of the said day at the ward, city and county aforesaid the dwelling house of one John De Puyster Hepplewhite there situate, feloniously and burglariously did break into and enter there being then and there a human being in said dwelling house, with intent to commit some crime therein, to wit, the goods, chattels, and personal property of the said John De Puyster Hepplewhite, then and there being found, then and there feloniously and burglariously to steal, take and carry away one silver tea service of the value of five hundred dollars and one pair of opera glasses of the value of five dollars each with force and arms----"

"But that silver tea service cost fifteen thousand dollars and weighs eight hundred pounds!" whispered Mr. Hepplewhite.

"Order in the court!" shouted Captain Phelan, pounding upon the oak rail of the bar, and Mr. Hepplewhite subsided.

Yet as he sat there between his lawyers listening to all the extraordinary things that the Grand Jury evidently had believed Schmidt intended to do, the suspicion began gradually to steal over him that something was not entirely right somewhere. Why, it was ridiculous to charge the man with trying to carry off a silver service weighing nearly half a ton when he simply had gone to bed and fallen asleep. Still, perhaps that was the law.

However, when the assistant district attorney opened the People's case to the jury Mr. Hepplewhite began to feel much more at ease. Indeed O'Brien made it very plain that the defendant had been guilty of a very grievous--he pronounced it "gree-vious"--offense in forcing his way into another man's private house. It might or might not be burglary--that would depend upon the testimony--but in any event it was a criminal, illegal entry and he should ask for a conviction. A man's house was his castle and--to quote from that most famous of orators and statesmen--Edmund Burke--"the wind might enter, the rain might enter, but the King of England might not enter!" Thus Schmidt could not enter the house of Hepplewhite without making himself amenable to the law.

Hepplewhite was filled with admiration for Mr. O'Brien, and his drooping spirits reared their wilted heads as the prosecutor called Bibby to the stand and elicited from him the salient features of the case. The jury was vastly interested in the butler personally, as well as his account rendered in the choicest cockney of how he had discovered Schmidt in his master's bed. O'Brien bowed to Mr. Tutt and told him that he might cross-examine.

And then it was that Mr. Hepplewhite discovered why he had been haunted by that mysterious feeling of guilt; for by some occult and subtle method of suggestion on the part of Mr. Tutt, the case, instead of being a trial of Schmidt, resolved itself into an attack upon Mr. Hepplewhite and his retainers and upon the corrupt minions of the law who had violated every principle of justice, decency and morality in order to accomplish the unscrupulous purposes of a merciless aristocrat--meaning him. With biting sarcasm, Mr. Tutt forced from the writhing Bibby the admission that the prisoner was sound asleep in the pink silk fastnesses of the Bouguereau Room when he was discovered that he made no attempt to escape, that he did not assault anybody and that he had appeared comatose from exhaustion; that there was no sign of a break anywhere, and that the pair of opera glasses "worth five dollars _apiece_"--Tutt invited the court's attention to this ingenuous phraseology of Mr. Caput Magnus, as a literary curiosity--were a figment of the imagination.

In a word Mr. Tutt rolled Bibby up and threw him away, while his master shuddered at the open disclosure of his trusted major-domo's vulgarity, mendacity and general lack of sportsmanship. Somehow all at once the case began to break up and go all to pot. The jury got laughing at Bibby, the footmen and the cops as Mr. Tutt painted for their edification the scene following the arrival of Mrs. Witherspoon, when Schmidt was discovered asleep, as Mr. Tutt put it, like Goldilocks in the Little, Small, Wee Bear's bed.

Stocking was the next witness, and he fared no better than had Bibby. O'Brien, catching the judge's eye, made a wry face and imperceptibly lowered his left lid--on the side away from the jury, thus officially indicating that, of course, the case was a lemon but that there was nothing that could be done except to try it out to the bitter end.

Then he rose and called out unexpectedly: "Mr. John De Puyster Hepplewhite--take the stand!"

It was entirely unexpected. No one had suggested that he would be called for the prosecution. Possibly O'Brien was actuated by a slight touch of malice; possibly he wanted to be able, if the case was lost, to accuse Hepplewhite of losing it on his own testimony. But at any rate he certainly had no anticipation of what the ultimate consequence of his act would be.

Mr. Hepplewhite suddenly felt as though his entire intestinal mechanism had been removed. But he had no time to take counsel of his fears. Everybody in the courtroom turned with one accord and looked at him. He rose, feeling as one who dreams; that he is naked in the midst of a multitude. He shrank back hesitating, but hostile hands reached out and pushed him forward. Cringing, he slunk to the witness chair, and for the first time faced the sardonic eyes of the terrible Tutt, his adversary who looked scornfully from Hepplewhite to the jury and then from the jury back to Hepplewhite as if to say: "Look at him! Call you this a man?"

"You are the Mr. Hepplewhite who has been referred to in the testimony as the owner of the house in which the defendant was found?" inquired O'Brien.

"Yes--yes," answered Mr. Hepplewhite deprecatingly.

"The first witness--Bibby--is in your employ?"

"Yes--yes."

"Did you have a silver tea set of the value of--er--at least five hundred dollars in the house?"

"It was worth fifteen thousand," corrected Mr. Hepplewhite.

"Oh! Now, have you been served by the defendant's attorneys with a summons and complaint in an action for false arrest in which damages are claimed in the sum of one hundred thousand dollars?"

"I object!" shouted Mr. Tutt. "It is wholly irrelevant."

"I think it shows the importance of the result of this trial to the witness," argued O'Brien perfunctorily. "It shows this case isn't any joke--even if some people seem to think it is."

"Objection sustained," ruled the court. "The question is irrelevant. The jury is supposed to know that every case is important to those concerned--to the defendant as well as to those who charge him with crime."

O'Brien bowed.

"That's all. You may examine, Mr. Tutt."

The old lawyer slowly unfolded his tall frame and gazed quizzically down upon the shivering Hepplewhite.

"You have been sued by my client for one hundred thousand dollars, haven't you?" he demanded.

"Object!" shot out O'Brien.

"Overruled," snapped the court. "It is a proper question for cross-examination. It may show motive."

Mr. Hepplewhite sat helplessly until the shooting was over.

"Answer the question!" suddenly shouted Mr. Tutt.

"But I thought--" he began.

"Don't think!" retorted the court sarcastically. "The time to think has gone by. Answer!"

"I don't know what the question is," stammered Mr. Hepplewhite, thoroughly frightened.

"Lord! Lord!" groaned O'Brien in plain hearing of the jury.

Mr. Tutt sighed sympathetically in mock resignation.

"My dear sir," he began in icy tones, "when you had my client arrested and charged with being a burglar, had you made any personal inquiry as to the facts?"

"I didn't have him arrested!" protested the witness.

"You deny that you ordered Bibby to charge the defendant with burglary?" roared Mr. Tutt. "Take care! You know there is such a crime as perjury, do you not?"