The Jury (8 page)

“I see,” answered Daphne, with frigid anger. “Your wife means nothing to you. The first pretty face you see——”

“My dear Daphne, why repeat that nonsense? I've seen hundreds of pretty faces since I married you.”

“Well, what do you want me to do? Do you want me to divorce you?”

When he admitted that divorce was in his mind, she began, with a kind of deadly deliberation, unpacking all her store of bitterness. As he listened, the world grew ugly and obscene,
and all human life a squalid confusion of lechery and greed. Outwardly he met anger with anger, bitterness with bitterness; but in his heart, during that nightmare interview, there was nothing but misery and pain. He was hurt and humiliated by the vileness she heaped upon him, bewildered by her reckless hatred; but mingling with those emotions, and surviving them, was pity for her desperate condition, and the thought came, never to leave him again at peace: She wasn't like this before. This is what I've done to her. He would not in quieter moments accept that verdict: he argued cogently against it and found himself not guilty. But the fear lurked in his mind, the sense of a spiritual responsibility for Daphne was always ready to leap out upon him from the dark corner to which he had dismissed it. Yet here he was, with Elisabeth; here he was in the paradise that Elisabeth made for him. The very grass of these lovely hills was greener for her sake. The noble contours of that heavenly horizon were an aspect of her; the sky was filled with her light; she was as various as life itself. These boyish sentiments gushed in his heart at sight of her, but he knew better, had learned better, than to put them into words. When he said to himself, sentimentally, that she was the woman he had always dreamed of, he went wide of the truth; for she was a new world to him, and a world beyond imagining. She seemed to belong to no nation and to conform to no type. She was dark and slim, with a beauty that was austere to the point of coldness; and despite the young perfection of her body, the rose-petal smoothness of her face, sometimes, even though she gave herself with dark abandonment, he felt that she might be a thousand years old, a woman of legend, remote and unearthly, always listening to a music beyond mortal hearing.

“I don't really know you at all, do I?” he said.

She smiled. “How could you know me better?” What the smile meant was more than he would ever know. Was it irony or tenderness? Or a compound of both? Even her tenderness had a quality strangely impersonal; and though she was generous in love, and utterly innocent of coquetry, he knew that there was some part of her personality, some part where the mystery of her self resided, that was for ever beyond his possession. It maddened and delighted him to be
always moving forward to a goal which he could never reach.

“Will you marry me, Elisabeth?”

“You would have two wives?” she asked.

His brow clouded a little. “I'm assuming that that difficulty could be adjusted. My wife will divorce me as soon as she realizes that I'm serious. It's the only logical thing to do.”

“And will she do what is logical, Roderick?”

The sound of his name on her lips never failed to cause him a pang of pleasure. They conversed always in German, which he spoke with ease; and this ‘Roderick' was the only comparatively English word she often had occasion to pronounce. He began, now, to answer her question, beginning with a somewhat elaborate analysis of Daphne's emotional reactions to this new situation … but he very soon realized that Elisabeth was listening rather to his voice than to his words.

“You're not listening,” he accused her.

“Am I not?”

“And you haven't answered my question either. Will you marry me when I'm free?”

She shrugged her shoulders. “Perhaps. … But no. You are not yet out of prison. It is early to talk of what prison you shall be confined in next. And I think marriage is not for us.”

“But surely?” he protested. “We love each other. And so …” He broke off, suddenly shy of speech. Yet after a silence, which she showed no sign of breaking, he forced himself to ask: “You do love me, don't you?”

She sat down at her piano, the piano which, obsequious to her wishes, a famous London firm had ‘put unreservedly at her disposal' and been glad of the chance. She began playing, improvising: then, as if his words had only just reached her, she let her hands fall to her lap and turned to look at him.

“Do I love you? What does that mean? We have loved, yes. We shall love again perhaps. But certainly we shall love again. Love will take us. The moment comes and passes. But I can't make words about love. Love isn't words: it is something that happens.”

“It happens,” agreed Roderick. “And it
has
happened. It's here, with us, isn't it? It's taken possession of us.”

She shook her head, and her smile was more than ever remote. “I am your friend. That goes on. But this love, it is a storm. It comes and it is gone. And then perhaps it comes again. Meanwhile, we are friends. Isn't that so?”

He was puzzled. “Well, I don't see what better basis there could be for marriage, do you?”

“Now I shall play to you,” she said.

This she had often said to him, and now, for the first time, the words were not quite welcome. There was more to be said, and her playing would be an evasion. But the opening chords persuaded him otherwise. The world crumpled at a touch of her fingers; all senses were lost in listening; the personal was pared away and the naked spirit stepped into a region of pure light. It was a region without form, and void of anything but this vital element; and in the void, as it were of the very light itself, a new world of unimaginable beauty was in process of building, a flowering pattern of melody clear and cool and confident, a discourse reasonable and sensual in mode, but in essence a continuum transcending reason and sense, an affirmation of the absolute. Fulfilled of all desire, brimming over with an inexhaustible satisfaction, it was calm and joyous, orderly and inevitable, untroubled by passion. Its order was the outward sign of a celestial economy; its joy was the joy of perfect statement; it was itself the reality that it affirmed.

For some moments after the music ceased he remained contemplating the thing it created, and it was with a deep involuntary sigh that he came back at last to his body sitting in a chair, surrounded by the four walls of a room, imprisoned in a network of material relations, himself a mere tangle in the vaster tangle of time and space. Thought, which had been so divinely suspended, began stirring again; and he wondered, idly, whether this choice of Haydn had been Elisabeth's answer, deliberate or intuitive, to his urgent tedious practicalities. Or had she played the first thing that came into her mind, in order to escape from him into her own country? While Roderick was framing this question, Mark Perryman, in a telephone call-box near the Strand, heard the operator ask him for ninepence. It was six o'clock, but the day was still hot, and Mark was sweating copiously after five
minutes' confinement in this place. He pressed a sixpenny-piece into the slot, and three pennies into the larger slot, and waited with that air of dogged resolve which telephoning from a call-box makes inevitable.

Roderick, resenting the interruption, picked up the receiver. “Who? Yes. Speaking. Oh, is that Mark?” He listened for two minutes. What he heard did not please him, but he put a good face on it. “No, not tonight. Absolutely impossible, tell her. What reason? Any reason in the world. The truth if you like. I might manage tomorrow. All right, I
will
manage tomorrow. Very good of you, Mark—sorry you've been dragged into it. Oh, of course. Naturally … I'll ring you up from the office.… Good-bye.” Roderick looked at Elisabeth with unhappy eyes. “A message from my wife.”

“Yes?”

“It wasn't she herself speaking. We communicate through a friend. She preferred it so.”

“And is she in a logical mood?” asked Elisabeth, lightly.

“She wants to see me.”

“But naturally!”

“She thinks we must meet and talk things over. And come, as she says, to an understanding. She even suggested that I should go there tonight.”

“Go there? Where is that?”

“Go home. She must have known I couldn't do that at a moment's notice.”

Elisabeth smiled, and the effect of the smile was to make him wonder if he was being quite sincere. “You mustn't be angry with her,” she said. “Perhaps she is not so very wise, eh?”

Roderick made a wry face. “Anyhow I've had to promise to meet her tomorrow.”

“Yes?”

“Will you forgive me if I'm not able to get down to see you tomorrow? You do understand?”

She faced him steadily. “My poor anxious friend, do not apologize to me. It is the only thing that makes me angry. You are very fond of your logical wife. It is a habit perhaps, but never mind, you are fond of her. Perhaps you'll make up your quarrel and then you'll be a good husband again. Why not?”

He stared ruefully, disconcerted by her coolness. “A funny question for you to ask. Doesn't it matter to you? It matters a lot to me.”

“What are you afraid of, Roderick?” she asked, almost coaxingly.

“Afraid?”

“Yes, you're afraid. Afraid of your conscience. Afraid that your wife will be so unhappy that you must go back to her. Isn't that it?”

He evaded her glance. It was painful to his vanity to be so easily read, but he was half-glad, none the less, to be spared the burden and humiliation of laying bare his quivering conscience to this cool, kind gaze.

“I shall be with you again on Thursday, you know,” he said suddenly, after a silence.

“Yes?” she answered. No irony was ever kindlier. “And if not Thursday, some other day. Next week. Next month. I shall be glad when you come. And if you don't come at all I shan't be angry.”

He realized, with a spasm of indignation, that he was being treated like a child. But indignation was short-lived, for indeed he had not for thirty years felt so much a child, so helpless and bewildered.

THE front-door bell rang, and Mr Bayfield, starting out of his nap, made haste to get his denture into position before rising to greet Dolly. She did not visit home so often nowadays, and a man with a smart young daughter has to think of his appearance a bit, or she's apt to consider herself a cut above him. He stood in an expectant attitude in front of the empty fire-place, while Mrs Bayfield went to answer the door. But he listened in vain for the sound of Dolly's high-pitched voice and refined articulation. What was going on? The suspicion that it was not Dolly after all, that he had had all his trouble for nothing, that perhaps Dolly wouldn't come this evening in spite of her promise, provoked in him an emotion
that expressed itself as indignation. Here he was, the head of the family, a respectable hard-working tradesman; and nothing went right unless he saw to it himself. In some obscure fashion he felt that it would be his wife's fault, and his son Ernie's, and the world in general's, if Dolly failed to put in an appearance. That it would be Dolly's fault, too, went without saying, young people nowadays being all alike, even the best of them; no consideration for a father's feelings, no common gratitude; slave you do and slave you may, and what thanks do you get? That was what Mr Bayfield wanted to know. But what he wanted to know even more immediately was what Gladys was doing at the door so long. If the girl's come, bring her in. If she's not come, shut the door and let me have my nap out in peace.

He was on the point of explosion when the sound of the door being shut eased the tension of the moment. But his irritation was renewed at sight of Mrs Bayfield. Dingy and forlorn, she stood looking at him, with fear in her bespectacled eyes. Her accustomed serenity had vanished.

“Well, I must say——” began Mr Bayfield, not knowing in the least what he must say, knowing only that he was a much-tried man. For it was plain that Dolly had not come.

His wife interrupted him. “It's Dolly,” she said.

“What d'you mean, it's Dolly?” he asked angrily. But he saw that she had a paper crumpled in her hand. “D'you mean she's not coming?”

“An accident,” said Mrs Bayfield. “She's in hospital.”

“There!” shouted Mr Bayfield. “What did I tell you!” Meaningless words: he had told her nothing. Dolly in hospital. He snatched the telegram out of her hand, and read it. “Them blasted cars ought not to be allowed.”

“Oh, do be quiet, Jim! It's
Dolly,
I tell you. And us standing here,” she added, suddenly coming to life.

The appeal sobered him a little. “Get your hat on then. Where are my boots?”

“And I'm all untidy,” said Mrs Bayfield, hurrying into the passage.

As he lugged on his boots—he was a man who had never taken to shoes—he heard her moving about the bedroom above. “Take her an hour to get ready,” he grumbled. But
he remembered, with a sort of surprise, that Dolly was her daughter as well as his; and the thought invested the drab woman with a new quality, so that he was suddenly impatient to see her again; but when, three minutes later, he met her at the bottom of the stairs, something made him avert his eyes. “Come on, do!” he said. His right arm moved blindly round her bony shoulders and for a moment rested there.

That moment passed quickly, and the mood with it. Mr Bayfield lapsed into peevish annoyance with all the inconsiderate circumstances that were forcing him to break his routine. Surely a man had a right to a quiet half-hour after his supper? Yet here he was, being forced to an untimely exertion of his heavy, unalert limbs. It was astonishing how people
would
get in his way, and infuriating that they should be so cheerful about it. Boarding the tram was like a sick dream, everybody moving with the most fantastic deliberation, as though resolved to delay Mr Bayfield as much as possible. At intervals throughout the journey he felt compelled to mutter at his wife: “Some people don't seem to know what time is.” Not once, however, did she answer him: a fact that heightened his sense of grievance. Dolly had plucked him from his chair and was dragging him across London, but his thoughts were not of Dolly, by some trick they managed to avoid Dolly, until the sight of the hospital sent them swarming back to her. Somewhere in this building … it was hardly credible. Mrs Bayfield was suddenly in command and Mr Bayfield in confusion. Have you, can you, accident, yes, it's my daughter. The man at the door was serenely helpful, wafting them on. And then ask again. They asked again, and the nurse said Follow me. Like Jesus Christ, thought Mr Bayfield, and good shepherds came into his fantasy, and Christmas bells, and robins in the snow. And all the while he was getting nearer the moment when he must see Dolly.