The Jury (34 page)

And, now, what Sidney couldn't get over was that wireless business.

“You'd be a clever man if you could,” commented Gaskin, recovering the poise that Bonaker had momentarily lost him.

Thus encouraged, Sidney plunged into superfluous explanations. “That message, you know. He must have heard it. The man said he saw him listening.”

“Exactly,” said Cyril Gaskin. “A message that his wife is dangerously ill, and what does his lordship do? Goes calmly off to America—or would have done.”

Bonaker raised a puzzled head. “Do you mean the Judge?”

Everybody stared at him.

“We said nothing whatever about the Judge.” Gaskin tried to be patient, but really …!

“We're speaking of the prisoner, don't you see!” said Nywood. “And that business at the hotel.”

“He
said something about ‘his lordship',” objected Bonaker, jerking a shoulder towards Gaskin. “The prisoner isn't a lordship, is he? First I've heard of it.”

“Really!” exclaimed Gaskin. “Don't you understand, it's a way of speaking?”

“Silly way of speaking, don't you think?” asked Bonaker, as one friend to another. Gaskin opened his mouth to answer, but Bonaker's voice, dull and flat and loud, went heartily on: “You know—confusing somehow. Doesn't make sense, to my mind.”

“It really doesn't seem to me,” said Gaskin, with dignity, “a matter of very great importance——”

“Quite. Quite,” interrupted Bonaker. “Thought I'd just mention it. No offence.”

What a common sort of man that is! thought Lucy. So unlike someone
I
know. He asked me to call him Edward.

“On the other hand,” said Charles Underhay, “that particular bit of evidence was a good deal shaken by the Defence. It's only fair to remember that. That barman didn't seem to me a very trustworthy witness.”

“What the German woman said,” remarked Brackett, “flatly contradicted his evidence. She said the prisoner was with her in the dining-room at nine o'clock. And we know that the message came over at nine o'clock.”

“And, pray, what does that mean?” cried Gaskin. “It means that one of the two is lying. Come now, let's ask ourselves, let's face it: Which of them had the strongest motive for lying?”

“The woman,” said Roger Coates.

“Hear, hear!” said Bayfield. “She didn't want to give him away.”

“I agree with you, gentlemen,” said Gaskin cordially. “And personally speaking,” he added, with an air of courageously defying the whole world, “I can't find it in my heart to blame her for it. It was her that had got him into the mess, and it was up to her, perjury or no perjury, to get him out of it. Perjury or no perjury,” repeated Mr Gaskin, almost passionately. We'll have no narrow-minded cant here, his flashing eyes declared.

He's really rather splendid, thought Lucy. Now suppose Edward had committed a murder, and the only way I could save him was to tell an untruth …

“Of course,” said Charles Underhay, “it's not a vital point. The case doesn't by any means depend on it.”

“You mean, sir,” suggested the Major, “that even if we
reject the barman's evidence, that doesn't prove the prisoner's innocence.”

“Exactly, Major.”

“But we haven't got to prove the prisoner's innocence, have we?” Bonaker inquired. “What I mean is, the boot's on the other foot, isn't it? We've got to make sure whether he's guilty or not. Isn't that so?”

“That,” said Gaskin, “if I may say so, my friend, is a distinction without a difference.”

“Well, you know best, I'm sure,” said Bonaker. “But there seems to
me
a sort of difference. Put it this way. Suppose I took it into my head that you were a dirty scoundrel. Nothing personal, of course—just an illustration. Well, I couldn't hang you for it, could I, till it had been
proved
that you were a dirty scoundrel? And if it wasn't proved, I'd have to let you go, wouldn't I? It stands to sense.”

Gaskin agreed.

“Good,” said Bonaker. “Now this is the point: I shouldn't have to prove that you
weren't
a dirty scoundrel, before letting you go, should I? As a matter of fact, it might take a bit of doing. It might be impossible.”

It appeared to Gaskin that he was being insulted.

“I beg your pardon!”

“Not at all,” said Bonaker.

“You mean,” Charles elucidated, “that we've got to be satisfied of the fact of guilt, and that if we aren't so satisfied, the contrary fact, of innocence, has to be assumed, whether we find it easy to believe or not?”

“That's the idea,” agreed Bonaker.

“True enough,” said the Major. “But isn't it all rather hypothetical, rather in the air? Isn't it painfully evident, from the facts before us, that the fellow's guilty? Here's a husband with a very good reason for wanting his wife out of the way. The wife dies of poisoning, and meanwhile, between the taking of the poison and the death, the husband has fled, without a word to anybody, and under an assumed name. Whether or not he listened in to that wireless SOS is neither here nor there.”

“We'll take it then that he didn't?” suggested Bonaker.

“Take it so, by all means,” said the Major. “But I'm
afraid we shall also have to take it that he poisoned his wife.”

Roger Coates, leaning across the table towards Gaskin, raised a question which for a long while, too long for his comfort, he had been entertaining in silence.

“I say,” said Mr Coates. “That woman of his. D'you think she knew he'd done it?” He smiled knowingly at the company.

MARK PERRYMAN glanced again at his watch. The jury had been away seven and a half minutes. He touched his neighbour's arm.

“Shall we wander outside for a bit?”

Elisabeth looked at him questioningly.

“They'll be some time yet,” said Mark, his hand still resting on her sleeve.

She made a gesture of assent, and rose. Mark followed her out of the court-room. At the door he paused, to say to the constable on duty: “We shall be just outside.” Though of that he was not sure. “You'll give me the tip when they come back?”

“Very good, sir.”

Mark overtook Elisabeth in the corridor. She smiled briefly as he fell into step by her side.

To Roderick, Elisabeth's quality was something infinitely subtle: subtle, lovely, elusive. It was his destiny, which he had passionately embraced, to adore her mystery and never possess it. Mark Perryman, to whom a shy faltering version of this conviction had been confided, did not see her so. His incorrigible bias towards realism, and his half-rueful persuasion that reality was essentially unromantic, made him hazard to himself, though not to Roderick, the opinion that his friend was the victim of a purely visual and aural enchantment. The warm darkness of the woman and the cold blue of her eyes, the lithe figure suggesting swiftness and the soft contours suggesting languor, the young fragility of the flesh and the rich maturity and haunting overtones of the voice:
this blend of physical delights, said Mark, was more than enough to fill a man's head with mystical notions, if the man happened to be old Roderick, who had somehow never outgrown the sublime folly of adolescence. Mark himself was not insensible to it, but for him, in spite of all that seemed to contradict it, her beauty was that of a child flowering luxuriously into womanhood. In Mark's estimation, she did not in the least tally with Roderick's account of her, except in the single point of beauty and charm. For all her intelligence, he found her simple
au fond,
and, for all her sophistication, primitive as Eve. To Roderick she was timeless, a flower of paradise: of her past and her future he made no question. To Mark (who lacked Roderick's inches) she was a tall young woman in process of ripening into a maturity whose wonder would richly excel her present charms. Those charms, from a position of safe neutrality, he found no difficulty in admiring: but in five years' time, he thought … and was dazzled by the prospect, for he had, among other and contrary tastes, a predilection for amplitude in woman.

He glanced at her half-averted profile and asked tentatively: “Would you care to go out into the street? Or stay here?”

In watchful solicitude for Elisabeth he found some distraction from the hideous anxiety in himself which, now that the crisis had come, could no longer be ignored. From the first moment of Roderick's danger he had laboured in his mind to make light of it. He made no pretence of denying that many a man had been hanged on such evidence as this, but after that his logic failed, and, though he distrusted mere hope, it was in a rationalization of hope that he took refuge. Since Roderick was palpably innocent, he argued, it was unthinkable that a British jury should find him guilty. And when the thought came, They don't know him as I do, he looked the other way, refusing to entertain it. But now, with only the verdict to wait for, all his inward resistances broke down. The case against Roderick was infernally plausible; and, to an outsider, was Roderick's story altogether convincing? Worse than that, Mark could not quite suppress an uneasy suspicion that Roderick had lied in one or two particulars. That SOS message for instance—did he or didn't he hear it? He might have heard it and disbelieved it, thinking it a trick not
uncharacteristic of poor Daphne in her more desperate moods. He might have heard it and ignored it for that reason. It wasn't like Roderick, for that kind of ruthless determination was something he conspicuously lacked: still, it just might have happened so. As for the poisoning, he could not have done that, except in madness; and if he had done it in madness, he would certainly have destroyed himself in the moment of returning sanity. You had only to know Roderick to know that. But what did the jury think? What were they thinking and saying at this moment? Surely they had enough common sense to see the kind of man he was? In spirit, Mark too was in the jury-room, flattering, cajoling, reasoning. In any group of twelve persons you get a few good fellows, don't you?

But while the uncontrolled part of his mind moved with a feverish activity, his will was fixed protectively on Elisabeth. To serve her was the only service he could now render to his friend, and in this he was single-minded and self-forgetful, so that he did not even remember to play his usual game of humorously deriding his own motives. To all appearance he was his ordinary urbane self serenely waiting upon events. There was a kind of suspended pain in his mind and body, but the voice that spoke to Elisabeth did not tremble or falter.

She smiled at him. She had heard his voice but not his question. He did not think it worth repeating, and they continued to pace slowly to and fro.

She turned to face him, taking him by both hands. “The summing-up. What do you think, Mark?”

“We must be patient,” said Mark.

A veil came over her eyes. “Yes, we must be patient. … It is not so very nice, this waiting,” she added, as if offering an explanation.

“It will be all right, of course,” said Mark smoothly. “Even if they bring in the wrong verdict—you understand?—even then there's the appeal.”

“You think they will say he is guilty,” said Elisabeth. It was a statement, not a question.

“No,” said Mark. “I don't know what they'll say. I'm in the dark, like you. I think what the Judge said was in Roderick's favour. A sensible jury would acquit him on that summing-up. But you can never tell with juries. But this is
the point. Listen. If this jury turns out to be stupid, Harcombe will lodge an appeal. Now the appeal will be heard without a jury, by three judges—long-headed old buffers.” “Long-headed? What is that?”

“Clever,” said Mark. “Far-seeing. Clever enough to see that Rod is an innocent man.” He abstained from mentioning that in about ninety-eight of every hundred cases the appeal was dismissed.

He went on talking. And while he talked he had his eye on the door of the court-room. He relied on the constable's promise. He went on talking, in low tones, knowing well that Elisabeth, though she seemed to listen, did not hear what he said, and, though she stared at him with wide eyes, did not see him. She's seven years old, he said: not a day more.

When he had run out of words it was as if a spell had been broken. Elisabeth emerged from her trance to say: “Why did she die? It was so foolish.”

The enigma of Daphne's death was something for which Mark had no thought to spare at this moment, and he felt that he could not help Elisabeth by discussing it. It had long been decided between them that the theory they favoured was that of suicide. But Mark had not been content to let it rest there. Someone, chance-met in that Fleet Street resort of his, mentioned having seen the late Mrs Strood in the company of a pale young man. “I'm not sure it wasn't the very day she died,” said this crony. “Funny, that.” And three days after Roderick's committal for trial, recalling this and that, adding two and two together and getting for answer a fantastic incredible figure, Mark jumped out of his fireside chair and went to the telephone. After an industrious use of that instrument he set out in search of Brian Goodeve.

MEETING Daphne in Regent Street, Brian began a hurried search among his attitudes, uncertain which to assume.

The agony of that summer had left him weary but not weary enough. That woman has destroyed me, he said. But no, it's
not true: she's left me still alive in my shell, buried alive in my shell, and to live is to suffer. October was as beautiful as ever. Burnt ashes of summer, fragrant in the nostrils: he tried the line over, hoping it might be poetry, but did not get so far as writing it down, for he found it on examination to be full of the very quality he spent his life in denouncing. Every word was wrong; every word was romantic and banal; 'burnt ashes' was a vile cliché, 'summer' dreadfully overdone, 'fragrant' unspeakably sentimental; and even 'nostrils' had probably been used by the so-called poets of the nineteenth century. Those impossible Romantics! He tried again: ochreous residue, heart's dregs. That was sufficiently unlike Tennyson, but it wouldn't do; 'dregs' was trite, and 'heart' was one of the bad old words, and anyhow the whole thing came perilously near being a statement. 'Excrement' would be better than 'dregs', for neither Keats nor Shelley would ever have said 'excrement'. But why write about autumn at all? 'Autumn'— another prohibited word. It only shows how frightfully second-rate I am, concluded Brian. He was self-contemptuous and enjoyed self-contempt. He took a sadistic pleasure in analysing his moods and disposing of his pretensions. Why pretend you're a poet? Why pretend you
want
to be a poet? Ask Freud: he'll tell you. Imperfectly sublimated sex, that's what it is. And very imperfectly, by God. Hail, copulation, bird thou never wert! Poetic flights are not for you, my dear libido. And Daphne, who the hell's Daphne? Is she the only woman, and aren't they all alike? There was a sort of pleasure in blaspheming his passion for Daphne, precisely because, despite his rantings, it retained a sacred quality and could not be reduced to a formula, whether bawdy or scientific. Having lost hope and sight of her, he saw his life as empty and aimless, and, obedient to his conception, it became so. He went on writing acid reviews as often as editors would let him, but the afternoon generally found him with nothing to do, nothing to think about, and then he would wander for hours about the streets of London, furtively glancing at the face of every young woman he saw, and sometimes turning on his heel and following one of them, for a hundred yards or so, feverishly, irresolutely, and to no ultimate purpose.