The Jury (32 page)

“You must see, Mrs Izeley,” explained Charles, remembering his manners, “that it's far too late in the day to raise a question like that.”

“I have conscientious objections,” said Blanche, cold with hostility.

“If you have conscientious objections, madam,” put in the Major, “you have no business on this jury at all. You should have raised your objection at the proper time, before the trial began. Since you didn't do so, it's your duty to help us.”

Blanche sat with a fixed uneasy smile, trying to feel superior to these crude men. But despite herself she recognized the force of the Major's argument. That shaft had gone home: she ought indeed to have refused to sit on this jury. What had tied her tongue at the critical moment? The severe impressive aspect of the Judge, the weight of ceremony and circumstance? Or had it been not so much timidity as a fantastic conceit, a proud persuasion that by sweet reason she would
purge her fellow-jurors of their mortal error, their belief in sin and death, and win them for the Higher Truth? Some such ambition had lurked, perhaps unrecognized, in her mind; and it had the more prospered in that soil because, obedient to her inclination, she had taken it for granted, before a word of evidence had been offered, that the prisoner was innocent. But the story that had been told in court had shaken that conviction; she perceived the wretched man to be so sunk in error, so deeply wallowing in the illusion called sex, that anything, anything, might have emanated from him —not, of course, from his Real Self, but from the mortal appearance, the bodily illusion, in which the Principle of Goodness was so far from being reflected. As the trial proceeded, and the court-room filled with Bad Thoughts, she even found herself forgetting to translate the experience into terms of her peculiar philosophy, and gave herself up, from time to time, to the simple reactions of horror and loathing. This man had done what her own lost Paul had done. He had left his wife and gone in carnal wickedness to another woman, just as Paul had left Blanche. That he had added murder to his wickedness mattered little, the so-called death of the body being of no account in the light of Reality. Yet … murder … and it might have been me! No, Paul would never have done that. But what if he had wished it? She shut her eyes against the hideous supposition, and for a while the noises of the court, question and answer and measured speech, seemed like noises in a dream.

“Moreover,” said Charles, with an appreciative nod to the Major, “you'll remember what we were told in court. We are not to concern ourselves with the question of punishment. That's outside our province. Our job is to give a true verdict on the evidence before us. The consequences of that verdict have nothing to do with us. I think I'm right, am I not, Major?”

“Certainly, you're right, sir. Quite. Quite.” A deuced clear-headed fellow, this foreman: shaping much better than I thought he would.

A new voice joined the discussion. It came from that lean, dark, saturnine fellow in the blue serge suit, who sat on the foreman's right. By name Bonaker.

“We're not concerned with the consequences,” remarked Bonaker, slowly and rather heavily. “That's right enough …”

“So perhaps …” said Charles, still intent on Blanche Izeley——

“All the same,” proceeded Bonaker, unhurrying, but in a suddenly raised voice that quite drowned the more cultured accents of the foreman, “all the same we know what the consequences will be, don't we, if we find that fellow guilty?” No one contradicted him. “And it's no use pretending we don't.” He looked gloomily round the table, apparently unaware of being tedious. “What I mean is,” he added, after a pause, “that knowing the consequences, hanged by the neck and so on, we can't take chances.”

“You mean,” said Cyril Gaskin, witheringly, “that we mustn't say he's guilty if he isn't.”

“Precisely,” agreed Bonaker, seeing nothing amiss with the remark. “That's just what I do mean.”

“I'm sure that's very helpful,” said Mr Gaskin, distributing his famous smile round the table. “That gets us on splendidly.”

Charles, ignoring Cyril's smile, and heartily disapproving of the smiling responses to it, returned to the attack on Blanche Izeley.

“So the question is, Mrs Izeley, did this man Strood, or did he not, give his wife poison?”

“I can't help thinking,” said Blanche—for there was no escape—“that he gave her what you call poison, but——”

“I think so, too,” interrupted Lucy Prynne, suddenly breaking out of her silence. “In the malted milk,” she explained, looking round.

“Very well,” said Charles. He noted that there were now six votes for conviction, including his own, the Major's, and that nasty little ladies' man's at the opposite end of the table. The plump Bayfield had made no secret of how
he
would vote, and that made seven. No dissentients.

“And you, sir? What do you say?”

“Guilty,” said Arthur Cheed.

IT cost Arthur a pang to say that, but he had made up his mind and when it came to the point he did not hesitate. To have to send a fellow-creature to the gallows was the vilest compulsion that the fates had ever put upon him. He felt he would have given anything to get out of it, and his heart warmed to the illogical Mrs Izeley, with her absurd belated talk of conscientious objections. Up to a point he shared those objections, and in nine cases out of ten he wouldn't have scrupled to seize wilfully upon some fine-drawn sophistical doubt and argue himself into a state of believing the crime unproved, even though in his secret mind he had been convinced to the contrary. If the man in question were a murderer not by disposition, but, as it were, by accident, if you could be morally sure that he'd never do it again, what good purpose was to be served by hanging him? So argued Arthur Cheed. But poisoning was in a class by itself; poisoning was all too apt to become a habit. If Strood had done what they said he had done, you couldn't think of him as a man at all: he was a subtle and dangerous beast, and the sooner the world was rid of him the easier we could sleep in our beds. Because, don't you see, he must have planned and timed the thing with extraordinary care; quietly, in his mind, he condemned his poor young wife to death, and smiled at her, and kept up a pretence; kissed her as usual; made love to her, perhaps, with murder in his heart. And, whatever the Defending Counsel might say, the case against Strood did carry conviction. It fitted together; you could see it all happening; and you couldn't, by any manner of means, miss seeing that the prisoner's story was largely, and at all the crucial points, a pack of lies.

Either the man was guilty, thought Arthur, or he was the most unfortunate victim of coincidence that ever lived. Arthur Cheed posed the alternative in a merely rhetorical spirit, for in fact he had no doubt of Strood's guilt. Had he powerfully wished to doubt, he could have managed it; but
the wish, inevitable flower of a naturally gentle heart, was not strong enough to contend against the counterwish, rooted in the same rich soil, that cruelty so vile in its effects should be cut off from the body of mankind like the malignant growth it was. This was his reasoning, and, so far, he knew his mind. But there were perhaps other things working in him that he didn't know, or didn't notice. He didn't notice, for example—why should he?—that up to a certain point in the trial he was passionately with the prisoner, pitying and understanding, and beyond that point saw him with entirely different eyes and could believe no good of him. COUNSEL: “Now tell us, Mrs Tucker, how did the prisoner receive this piece of news?” MRS TUCKER: “He flew into a temper.”

Arthur Cheed did not pause to recall the time of his own wife's pregnancy, but it lived in him, part of his intimate history, part of himself: like the first things of childhood, like sunlight and flowers dawning on a virgin mind, it was a cardinal event lending its own subtle colour to the window through which he saw the world. A golden age, anxious, hopeful, shot through with shafts of unimaginable excitement. In their first year of marriage he and Nellie had exercised a deliberate caution. His garage was then only a dream, scarcely that; and a cycle-dealer, running a small shop in an Essex town inconveniently far from London (but rents were the cheaper for that inconvenience), is not in a position to rush headlong into paternity. Arthur's little bit of capital— his mother's sixty-pound legacy, augmented by the army gratuity—had been quickly engulfed in the twin enterprises of commerce and marriage. One ambition he had realized promptly: ever since he had been old enough to think about such things he had wanted to own a bit of freehold, to stand on his own ground and know that every grassblade that sprang up within given boundaries was his own. It was a blissful day when he fixed up with Hartop, a little eager speculative builder and a man after his own heart, to buy an acre in the middle of a field. Three months before the wedding he sprang it on Nellie, this blessed acre, as a surprise. They arrived, cold and hungry, in the dusk of a November day; having glanced benevolently at the exterior of the cycle-shop, they walked a mile or two into the country, and a further mile
across sodden fields, and there it was, the acre, bare grass indeed, and to the unseeing eye no different from the land that environed it, but invested with a rare beauty for these two people by the single strand of barbed wire that marked it off as their own.

“Something to show you,” said Arthur, desperately afraid now lest the long-prepared 'surprise' should fall flat. She waited, mystified. It was rather cold when you stood about. “You see this bit of land, Nellie?”

“What bit of land, Arthur?”

“Well, this bit, this fenced-in bit.”

“You mean this what we're standing on?”

“Yes. That's right. Well”— his heart sank into his boots— “do you like it?”

She was almost afraid to guess what he was driving at. “You don't mean——?”

“Yes, I do,” said Arthur. “It's ours.”

“Ours!”

“I've bought it,” said Arthur. “For us,” he added. He was beginning to feel better. Things were going to be all right after all.

Nellie had never seen anything so lovely in her life as that wire fence. Her eye, travelling round it, came incredulously to rest upon the vast extent of greenness that it enclosed.

“Go on,” she said. “You're pulling my leg.” But she believed no such thing. It couldn't be true, but it
was
true. She was embarrassed with so much happiness, and felt that she could never do enough to deserve so wonderful a man as Arthur. “You don't mean it, do you? Not really?”

Arthur was now himself again. “Course not. Just a little joke of mine. But Hartop doesn't know that. He's been and spent the money by now, I shouldn't wonder. Thought it was real money, don't you see.”

“Oh, Arthur, what a tease you are!” said Nellie blissfully. When she lifted her eyes to the hills, the wooded hills of the horizon, she felt the tears coming, because he was so good and she so happy, because her love was more than she could bear, because she couldn't begin at once, that very night, to be a wife to him. All she could do was to squeeze his hand and say: “Who's Hartop? First I've heard of him.”

“Hartop? He's the chap I bought it from. I mean the chap I pretended to buy it from—he don't know the difference.”

“He must be an awfully nice man,” said Nellie.

“Good as gold,” agreed Arthur. “He's a sort of builder in a small way. Takes an interest too.”

After a silence heavy with contentment Nellie asked: “Does anybody else know, besides Hartop?”

“No fear! Only you and me.”

“It's our secret,” said Nellie. “Oh, Arthur!” She looked at him, a lean sandy-complexioned young man in a somewhat grease-stained waterproof coat. He had recently lost a front tooth. “I want to give you a hundred babies,” she said.

He smiled, with a mingling of happiness and irony that she found angelic. “More the merrier. But one at a time, ducks, if it's all the same to you. Though of course,” he added, with an air of gravely pondering the question, “they might come a bit cheaper if we had 'em in dozens.”

“Oh, Arthur, you
are
silly!”

“Well,” said Arthur, “have to be getting back, I s'pose.” It wasn't much fun sending Nellie back to her mother after this. “By the way,” he threw out casually, disguising his pride, “it's an acre, in case you want to know.”

“Really!” cried Nellie. “But it looks much more than that,” she added loyally.

“We'll have a few trees in, later on,” promised Arthur. “Trees all the way round. How'd that be?”

“Are we going to make a nest in one of the trees, to live in?” asked Nellie.

“That's the idea,” said Arthur. “You've got it. Just right. But we'll maybe have some sort of a wooden shack as well. You know,” he explained. “Doors and windows and a chimney-pot.”

“What shall we want that for, if we live in the trees?”

“For the birds, of course,” said Arthur. “They've got to live somewhere, poor little devils.”

After a silence, a silence big with the future, Nellie asked rather anxiously: “Will it cost an awful lot, Arthur?”

“Not so bad,” said Arthur. “My idea is, one of those wooden huts. Only for a time. Till we see a bit further ahead. You can get one ready-made and put it up yourself.
They're quite a decent size, you know. Easily fix up a couple of rooms inside. But of course,” he added, anxiously, “it won't be a proper house like you've been used to.”

“Aren't men stupid!” cooed Nellie softly. Darkness was coming on fast, but the light that shone from her was enough light for Arthur. “Aren't they just!” Before he could say anything she went on in a dreaming voice: “A tiny wooden house all to ourselves. And this enormous piece of land. You're sure it's really ours, Arthur?”