“Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord; and that
means that it is not the Lord Chief Justice’s.”
--_Bernard Shaw._
It all began by their talking of love and hate, as they set out on a
Sunday afternoon excursion to the moors. Mr. Proudfoot advocated love
and forgiveness; Weaver maintained his faith in a good man’s hate. And
Proudfoot hated Weaver and could not forgive him because Weaver would
not love and forgive. On the way to the tramcar terminus Mr. Proudfoot
called in at the grocer’s (it was Sunday, but the shop was
surreptitiously open, and Betty, the twelve-year-old girl of the grocer,
was reading assiduously a three-penny novelette, entitled--he strained
forward to look--_Only a Mill Girl_). Having bought his usual
cigarettes, “Get away with you!” rejoined Mr. Proudfoot, continuing the
argument.
“Undoubtedly!” said Weaver stubbornly. He envied the other his command
of the pen, but doubted if the author knew “life” as well as he, Weaver,
knew it. “_I_ could give you material enough to fill a dozen novels if
you asked me,” he would say, and tell him of a thirty-stone man eating
enough for three; of a hangman in the neighbourhood who in his off-duty
hours was an innkeeper. “I want you to meet him. A character for you.
Bites off the heads of live rats if a customer will stand beer all
round.” Mr. Weaver was a dentist. There was something provocative about
all the dentists of Mr. Proudfoot’s experience. They all pretended to
ambitions outside their profession. They had all wished to be writers,
artists, poets, composers or statesmen, and now handled their surgical
tools, extracted teeth, with a kind of embittered “_Tant pis!_” The very
first day on which Mr. Proudfoot had called on Mr. Weaver in Gilbert
Street, Pedlar-with-Thresham, and inquired if it hurt to have a tooth
out, Weaver had said, “No. A second, and it’s out,” and holding it
between his pincers (while his client rinsed his mouth with warm water
and spat out blood), the dentist was already discoursing: “Now I’ve been
reading about this Einstein fellow, you know, and I’ve me own ideas
about this ’ere relativity business, if you know what I mean. I look at
meself in the glass--and am satisfied with meself, metaphorically, don’t
you know. But it does not follow, cosmically speaking like, that I
present the same satisfactory appearance. In the same way, following the
deductions of my--he, he--rather cynical philosophy, you’ll think,
flies, I say, may be as trivial and at the same time as important units
in the cosmos as ourselves, and in the end their souls go back to the
world-soul from which they sprang. Open your mouth.”
“Is there a world-soul?”
“_Undoubtedly!_” A rotund little body, smartly arrayed, Mr. Weaver went
on: “This afternoon was a bit slack. Lately I haven’t been feeling very
well. And middle age is upon me. I thought of my past achievements. I
had a look at my old medals--the one I got as a lad for swimming a
race, and that other one for cycling, don’t you know, and those other
two for amateur boxing. My mother, aye, she was proud of ’em! There.” He
sprinkled them out of a tin box on to his palm. “And I thought--how
shall I say?--it didn’t somehow seem as if it was ‘enough,’ if you know
what I mean. Come, open your mouth.”
“You’re a cheerful old pessimist, aren’t you?” said Mr. Proudfoot, and
opened his mouth.
“A cheerful pessimist? That’s what I call a contradiction in terms.”
Mr. Proudfoot smiled, and thought (because he could not speak) that
Weaver was rather like a man who, having grasped with difficulty the
four simple rules of arithmetic, is bewildered at being told that he can
waive them utterly in Algebra. He was fond of using difficult words
unnecessarily, and would trot out a _cliché_ on the slightest pretext.
Mr. Proudfoot might say that he preferred horses to motor-cars, only to
hear Weaver ejaculate: “A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!” Or
Mr. Proudfoot might say that he had served in the cavalry during the
War, for Weaver to remark, with lingering relish, “_Cavalleria
Rusticana_.” Or Mr. Proudfoot, perhaps in reference to the heavy rain,
had only to let fall the word “deluge” for Weaver to comment: “_Après
nous le déluge_, what?” looking at him with a self-complacent smile, to
see if he had noticed his culture. “I had a Frenchy here as an assistant
once, but had to kick him out: his gift of the gab was too much for me.
But I’ve picked up things, and I think I’ve got the hang of the lingo
all right, what?” But they had at once become friends, and in the
evening Weaver would invite him to his house, push out his wife--a thin
complacent woman with a long aquiline nose which Weaver thought
aristocratic, and whose contribution to any conversation did not extend
beyond the invariable affirmative: “That’s right.” “Out you go,” he
would say, “we’re an old bachelor party to-night.--Now then,” rubbing
his hands. “Now for it! I’ve been reading about this ’ere fellow
Spinoza, you know....”
And so on till after midnight. Mr. Proudfoot remembered these nights
afterwards: Weaver, tottering slightly after the beer, coming out into
the open and standing hatless in the middle of the street and saying (in
reply to Mr. Proudfoot desirous of making a professional appointment
with him on the morrow), “Any day, old chap! any day!”
Arguing, they had reached the tramcar terminus and boarded the train
which was to take them on their picnic out on to the moors. The world
seemed transfigured that wet but happy afternoon. It seemed to Mr.
Proudfoot that everything certainly was for the best in this best of all
possible worlds. The tramcars were running smoothly and efficiently. The
gay, handsome conductor performed his duty as if it were a pleasure. The
policeman looked well fed, well paid, well satisfied. Even the rain fell
satisfactorily from a dull but sober sky, and everybody was duly
provided either with raincoat or umbrella--all was undoubtedly just as
it should be. The world was well oiled and ran smoothly; everything was
a wheel turning round easily on its axle, and God the Mechanic walked
about his machinery and was well pleased.
And Mr. Proudfoot stood at once right inside and outside this
astonishing world. He had a pointed beard, long hands, and shy manners.
His name was said to have been “Proud-bottom.” There is a theory that an
ancestor of his applied for royal permission to annul the unpalatable
name, and the Sovereign had been graciously pleased to amend the
“bottom” to “foot.” Now Weaver had felt from the first that Mr.
Proudfoot was “different.” And he was right. Mr. Proudfoot was an author
of standing. And as for his being immortal, who can tell? He wrote
private letters with an eye to their post-humous publication, keeping a
copy of each, in case his friends should lose or mislay them. He was a
student of the old giants of literature, and he walked in their wake. He
did not throw away his old sponge, for example, recalling that Goethe’s
was on exhibition at his famous house in Weimar, and accordingly gave
his own to his sister to put away. As for the critics, whenever Mr.
Proudfoot published a new book, they wrote: “Very suggestive ... never a
dull page ... the interest sustained to the end. Nevertheless, one
wishes that the author would break new ground, express life from a new
angle....” But if he did leap over the fence and explore new tracks, “Go
back, go back,” they wrote in the newspapers, “get you back to the
simple delights of your earlier books and we will listen to you till the
crack of doom....” Mr. Proudfoot had arrived four months earlier in
Pedlar-with-Thresham. And why, in God’s name? you will ask. And indeed
it would be difficult to imagine why anyone should arrive there, if he
were not cursed by having to be there from the beginning. At the last
General Election a local magnate in welcoming the Liberal candidate to
Pedlar-with-Thresham from the dais raised outside the town hall,
exclaimed with patriotic emotion: “In Pedlar-with-Thresham we spin well
and vote well!”
“Aye--and starve well!” came a voice from the audience.
Such a place was Pedlar-with-Thresham. Mr. Proudfoot went there to get
“local colour” for a Lancashire novel he was then writing. Nor was this
the only reason. He had read in the newspapers of the low deathrate of
Pedlar-with-Thresham and so, as he was afraid of dying young, he went to
live there.
The sun had come out as the two men walked up on to the moors, arguing
heatedly, till Weaver, still maintaining his belief in hate, suggested
good-naturedly, “Let’s sit down here and have a go at what we’ve brought
with us, what? Open that basket. Come on, look out what you’re doing!
See, you can’t handle your tools properly. Oh my! Watch me. That reminds
me. I once captained a working men’s football team up North, and had to
take the blighters to London, where they were being entertained--mighty
lavishly too! They were the scum of the earth--no idea how to hold a
tool or to behave in decent society. So I said to them, ‘Look here, you
old blokes, watch me in everything, do just as I do, follow me, see? and
you’ll be all right.’ And I took the serviette--or what you fellows
would call the table-napkin, I s’pose--placed it carefully on me seat
and sat down on it. And they all--the whole blinkin’ crew of ’em--got
up, you know, placed their serviettes on their seats carefully and sat
down on ’em. Makes me roar even now when I think of it. Have another
beer. Look here, old chap, shall we run up and see the hangman I told
you about who bites off the heads of live rats--eh? He has his inn down
the road further up on the moors. Good material for you, what?”
“I wouldn’t go near one.”
“Why? he’s a necessary institution.”
“I question that. If it is impossible to prevent homicidal maniacs from
killing their fellows, then by all means let them forfeit their lives
painlessly at the hands of a doctor. So much mercy is shown to mad
dogs.”
“You need a hangman to frighten folk with.”
“Get away with you!”
“Undoubtedly!” said Weaver passionately.
“Nonsense. It’s suffering to no purpose.”
“It contributes in a way to the experience of the world-soul,” said
Weaver philosophically.
“Damn your world-soul! Damn your fanatical readiness to sacrifice real
suffering units for the sake of God knows what misty and unfeeling
generalities. You’ll burn human beings in furnaces as sacrifices for
what-not tin gods. You’ll plunge into war for what-not shaky
nationalist, imperialist, religious ideals. This fanatical _laisser
faire_, this hapless surrender of the only vital feeling
thing--individual human life--for an abstraction! It’s just here that
you let in Beelzebub, in the name of what-not vague and void
resplendence!”
“But there are compensations. Think of the pleasure a condemned man
enjoys in knowing that the entire world is talking of him. They enjoy
the vanity of it, without a doubt.”
“Get away with you!”
“_Undoubtedly!_” said Weaver, with tremendous emphasis, as he was wont
to do when feeling his opponent to be full of scepticism and doubt.
“When I say you are a fool, Weaver, I really don’t mean to insult you: I
merely wish to illustrate the word.”
“When I am landing you one on the chin, I do so entirely without malice.
There,” he said.
Proudfoot blinked. “You are right. I congratulate you on admirably
illustrating the incommensurable qualities of our respective weapons of
offence. Still, allow me to doubt the amount of a condemned man’s
enjoyment. An ex-warder told me once how out of ninety-eight executions
he had witnessed there was not one case when the victim did not either
collapse or was dragged fighting and screaming to the gallows. And the
women, they cry and kick their heels as they are carried there. But the
Press prints the official version that the prisoner ‘walked firmly to
the scaffold’ and that it was all over in less than twenty-five
seconds.”
“Still, I am in favour of hanging,” Weaver said, thoughtfully.
“No man has any right to be in favour of something the full horror of
which he is, through his own defective imagination, incapable of
realising.”
“Abolish capital punishment, and nobody’s life will be safe.”
“Stupidity,” said Mr. Proudfoot, “is in itself a hollow term: it is
people like yourself who lend it meaning. Nobody’s life will be safe!”
he mimicked derisively.
“Undoubtedly!”
“This is what they said of sheep-stealing at the time. ‘Abolish the
death penalty for stealing sheep, and not a sheep will be left in this
fair England of ours!’ And all those little boys and girls who, in Queen
Victoria’s golden reign, were hanged for stealing a spoon. ‘Abolish
hanging,’ the people said, ‘and there will not be left a single silver
spoon in England.’ Oh, my God! I’m ashamed of humanity.... Little boys
and girls ... in the condemned cell ... dragged out in the morning and
hanged ... in Victoria’s complacent time--when Englishmen were ‘good.’”
“Serve ’em right, the brats! Teach ’em a lesson! We had a case
recently----”
“Devil!” he said. “Devil!” Mr. Proudfoot clutched the stick in his
shaking fist--he was not to blame that the other end of it shook at a
far greater tangent--and thus shaking it at one end touched Weaver’s
neck with the other. Even as he did so he had a feeling that he had
overstepped the mark, and he was about to crave his friend’s
pardon--when he saw that he had indeed overstepped it. Weaver leaned
back and turned his face to his friend as who might say, “Hello, old
chap, what’s up?” But the singular thing was that Weaver remained
sitting there with just the same astonished look in his face. Only blood
was now trickling from the corner of his mouth down his new light-grey
suit.
* * * * *
Proudfoot remembered how distinctly his senses registered the details of
subsequent events. As he walked home one little boy out of a group of
little boys and girls asked him for a cigarette card. He said he hadn’t
any and passed along, but the little boy ran after him and shouted,
“Give me a cigarette card!”
“_Haven’t got any!_” he bellowed in reply.
And the little boy, frightened, began to cry softly.
“You shouldn’t ask like that,” he was consoled by his little sisters.
“You should ask properly.”
And suddenly Mr. Proudfoot felt that he was not the man to bellow now.
The tramcar was nearly empty. He would have preferred to have it full. A
fat old woman was holding forth to the conductor, who punctuated her
flowing narrative with periodical “Aye--aye”’s: “’Ad a real good time.
Forty of us went to Blackpool in a sharry. It cost us ten bob a ’ead.
Ee! but we did ’ave a fine h’outing. An’ such a dinner! We started wi’
lamb and green peas and fresh potatoes; after that we ’ed potato-pie,
an’ ’alf a chicken for each one of us, and pop to drink. After dinner we
went for a picnic and took us tea wi’ us. Eh, _’twas_ a treat! We ’ad
three fine tongues all cut up an’ ready like and plenty o’ bread an’
butter. But th’ pity was as I was off me h’appetite an’ couldn’t manage
me share. When we was coming w’home we called at a pub or two, as we was
very dry. Ee! but it _was_ a fine outing!”
Wasn’t life wonderful!
And suddenly Proudfoot remembered.
As he went down a narrow lane, a little girl said to a smaller one who
had fallen on a stone, “Now ye’ve made a ’ole in yer leg.” And he felt
that, in other circumstances, he might have smiled. Passing the
grocer’s, where Betty was still reading _Only a Mill Girl_, he wondered
whether he should go in as if nothing had occurred and buy his usual
packet of cigarettes. Or better not be seen. One less witness at court.
What had he better do? Now he was back in Pedlar-with-Thresham, and
passing the familiar brass plate with “Gilbert French, Solicitor,” he
wondered whether he should go in, remembering the pun he used to make
that Gilbert was a French solicitor. He somehow wished he was. He wished
he himself were away in France. But they would extradite him on a
warrant. Oh, God! was there really no escape?
Then things moved very quickly. He went home. The sun was still shining.
His father was sitting in the garden which gave upon the street. The two
men lived silently beside each other. They had never had much to say to
each other. The father, when the boy first showed signs of an
independent mind and temper and of wanting to adopt an unconventional
career, warned him solemnly: “You’ll come to a bad end, young
feller-me-lad!” Now the old man was very old: so old that his
thoughts--let alone his body--stirred with difficulty. He sat all day
long in the sun and at intervals would make remarks such as: “Aye, she
is a strong wench she is,” or “Aye, he is a big man he is that.” Then he
would sit very still, staring ahead with his watery old eyes, munching
with his empty loose mouth. Suddenly he would fall asleep, his mouth
hanging wide open. One day when he would thus fall asleep they would
nail him up in a coffin and drive him at great speed to the graveyard,
and put him into a wet black hole and cover him up altogether with
earth, and plant a great heavy stone on the top of him--and then come
home and take tea.
“Just as well,” Proudfoot reflected. “Just as well now.”
The sun had gone; it was just beginning to drizzle. His father turned
in. He sat by him and stared into the fire, waiting for the police to
come and arrest him. They did not come, and unable to bear the suspense
any longer he went out in order to give himself up at the police
station. It was beginning to get dark and chilly out-of-doors; the
polluted rain fell out of a soot-infested sky; and close to the door his
courage failed him and he went away again. What could he do? Where
could he go? It seemed all one. Mrs. Weaver knew that they had gone out
together and even knew the place. Was it really possible that such a
thing had befallen him? If it had befallen another man, if he had read
about it in the papers, it would seem natural enough; but that it should
have befallen _him_! It seemed impossible. The uncanny thing was that
the others would not know how impossible it seemed to him and would
require an intelligent account of it from him. Tired of walking,
frustration on all sides staring him in the face, he turned home and was
arrested by the two policemen who were already waiting for him.
The court next morning had no hesitation in charging him with wilful
murder, and, in charge of two men, he was taken to Liverpool, where a
grand jury brought in a true bill against him, and he was taken away to
await trial at the Assizes. Here the matter was put elaborately before a
grand jury, and he listened, bedraggled and bewildered, to his heinous
deed being recounted in the hearing of the public and ably handled by
the learned advocates; and he had a sense of clumsy unreality, as he had
had when attending the performance of his plays or reading in a printed
notice the reviewer’s brief narration of the plot of his own novel. All
this, attributed to him, did not seem his, was not of his own making.
But he was hopeful: there was time enough for despair later on. He
watched the prosecution unbend itself. A sly old fox counsel for the
Crown. He put it to them that the circumstances were most suspicious.
Prisoner had decoyed his victim into a lonely wood away up on the moors.
The wound witnessed that the blow had been inflicted with a blunt and
heavy weapon. Prisoner confessed as much. What more proof was needed of
his murderous intent? Mr. Proudfoot’s faith was in his counsel, as once
upon a time when he visited the races it had been in his jockey. He had
a reputation for an unbroken record of acquittals to sustain. He would
fight for them both to the last breath. And the judge seemed a
gentleman. Mr. Proudfoot had the same feeling of confidence in that
presiding wigged figure as in the umpire when, as a boy, he took part in
a lawn tennis tournament. But what was strange and uncanny was the
smooth procedure of it: the deference and kindness shown to him on all
sides. He was afraid that with that suave politeness, that unfailing
legal gloss, in those beautifully modulated Oxford accents, they might
bring him theoretically to within an inch of death, and then get the
common churl to carry out the messy business.
The judge was really nice--and so witty. Mr. Proudfoot smiled
good-naturedly at his remarks. He would have laughed, too, but that
might seem uncanny, irresponsible; might be considered as bravado on his
part; might even strike the judge as bordering on contempt of court. But
the judge must know that Mr. Proudfoot was an author and critic of
standing and might be flattered if he saw that his witticisms were
appreciated by the critic even at a trying time. The judge was detached
by virtue of his training. He pictured him as an elderly cultured
bachelor who had an ancient library and tender nieces who adored him.
Mr. Proudfoot and the judge would get on very well together. It was the
jurymen he was afraid of. God only knew in what wise the particular
machinery in their skulls manipulated thought. Counsel for the Crown was
a little ratty, to say the least of it. He would ask incriminating
questions: Who killed him? The devil killed him. He did not kill him. As
if he, Joseph Proudfoot, would ever do such a thing. He had merely
shaken his stick at him: the devil had operated the other end of it. But
if he had now told them that it was the devil who had killed Weaver, the
jury, being of the type who prided themselves on not being born
yesterday, would all the sooner come to a conclusion of his guilt. But
murder him, he didn’t--because murder had indeed never crossed his mind.
But counsel for the Crown thought otherwise. He could see no trace of
provocation to manslaughter, in the absence of which he saw murder, the
possibility of self-defence not even being mentioned by the other side.
And he suggested Mr. Proudfoot had murdered his friend for money.
“I suggest,” he said, “that you murdered him for his money and took it.”
“I repudiate your suggestion,” Mr. Proudfoot said, very pale.
Counsel for the defence was stipulating for manslaughter under
provocation, the provocation being Weaver’s inhuman attitude to those
poor children who, in Victoria’s crass time, had been suffered by a
callous public to forfeit their young lives at the hands of the hangman,
a dastardly crime which Weaver had offensively condoned; and this
general attitude to juvenile capital punishment raised a tremendous
controversy between the two sides, involving the merits of capital
punishment as a whole, the defence representing it as a barbarous relic
of a bygone age still lingering among us, and to which indeed his client
may fall a ready victim if the jury did not do their duty by him; till
the judge, resenting such round-about intimidation of the jury, said
that they were not here to debate whether the death penalty was right
or wrong in principle, but that the question which the jury had to keep
before them was whether prisoner had murdered Weaver or killed him under
justifiable provocation, in which latter case it might be said it was
manslaughter. Whereupon counsel for the defence respectfully
submitted to his lordship that the degree of provocation would
seem to be intimately bound up with his client’s sensitive and
all-too-human--perhaps over-sensitive, but he would hesitate to call it
over-human--attitude to a practice which to-day all right-thinking
people (“Hear, hear!” from the audience, the judge interrupting to say
that at the repetition of outside comments he would clear the
court)--yes, he repeated it advisedly, all right-thinking people could
but recall with a shudder of horror and disgust; and the learned judge
(the point at issue having crystallised itself by now) allowed the
argument to stand, limiting it strictly to the merits of the death
penalty as applied to children for stealing silver spoons at a
particular period in social history. Prosecuting counsel, in his turn,
submitted that if there was any provocation at all, even of a kind that
some people--though he himself was far from doing so--might find, if not
a ground, at least an extenuating circumstance for taking the life of
another human being, they had only the prisoner’s word for it. It was a
matter of credulity. He repeated the assertion of the learned counsel
for the defence in a faintly ironic tone, and added that he would ask
the jury to please declare the prisoner innocent of murder--if they
could honestly believe it. (He implied by a shade of sarcasm, if they
were really simple enough to believe such a wild thing.) Mr. Proudfoot
cast a quick glance at the jury. Two jurymen, looking singularly like
Messrs. Asquith and Lloyd George, he thought, mingled their locks in
contemptuous mirth. They seemed men with “no nonsense about them,” men
who would ask, “Do you see any green in my eye?” men who were prone to
believe that “there is no smoke without fire,” men who had sent saints
to the stake; men of whom Mr. Proudfoot all of a sudden had become
immoderately afraid. If they could believe such a thing, the prosecution
argued, there was an end of it and he had nothing further to say. But if
they did not, indeed _could_ not believe it, and there was no
provocation, he said (suddenly jumping one peg), then, he submitted, it
was murder pure and simple.
The proceedings made a web of rather illiberal quibbles, difficult for
any but a trained mind to unravel, but through all the crude, inaccurate
and intellectually dishonest cross-examinations there ran two threads:
the black thread of the prosecution and the white thread of the defence,
which the jury hoped the judge would disentangle for them in his
summing-up. Unable to sustain the charge that prisoner had taken any of
the victim’s money (though producing witnesses to show that Proudfoot
was in financial embarrassment), prosecuting counsel modified it to
saying that he _would_ have taken it, but in the horror of the crime
itself forgot the object of the crime. The defence thereon came forward
with a challenge to the prosecution either to substantiate the charge or
to withdraw it--a challenge which the prosecution met with a subversive
question: Indeed what other rational cause could have prompted prisoner
to commit the murder? A question retorted to by the defence with the
suggestion that the absence of all rational motive precisely pointed to
the view that apparently it was not murder, but manslaughter under some
sharp and instantaneous provocation, which tallied with his client’s
story. But prosecuting counsel knew his jurymen, and questioning whether
the expression of a contradictory opinion on some event in history could
be described as provocation, and questioning further whether prisoner
could be believed to tell the truth, he wound up his case with a
pseudo-generous invitation to the jury to exercise their credulity, if
they possessed enough of it, in believing the case for the defence.
Again Mr. Proudfoot glanced at the jury: hard-faced business men all,
“with no nonsense about them,” and one meagre “emancipated” woman who
looked as though she would not lag behind the men. “My God, my God, why
hast Thou forsaken me?”
He stared in front of him. Now they seemed very near, and now they
seemed very far, as if he were looking at them through the other end of
a pair of binocular glasses. He started from his trance: Good God! he
was actually in court, being tried, in fact, for his life!
He found the final speech for the defence inadequate. These lawyers were
all so suave and satisfied with one another: his man, while fighting for
his life, seemed so mindful of the prosecution, so gentlemanly, so aware
of his opponent’s high character and diverse gifts that Mr. Proudfoot
felt his barrister might easily betray him to his foe out of gracious
deference and general drawing-room politeness. So on the declaration of
a war, the signal for the indiscriminate butchery all round of human
flesh, ambassadors who had demanded the return of their credentials
will cordially shake hands with the immaculate kid-gloved Foreign
Secretary, before departing to the country with which the realm is “in a
state of war.” “This,” said Sir Frederick, laying down his brief,
“concludes the case for the defence.”
And now he felt there was only God between him and his doom.
Among men, who was his friend? Not the judge, you would think any more,
if you followed the hostile tone of his summing-up: the arguments
themselves were far too intricate for any layman not specially versed in
legal ways to follow. And Proudfoot wondered which of all his friends he
would want to help him in his present plight; and he thought that of all
men he wanted the good, fat, cheery, smiling Weaver. And a laugh broke
from his mouth and tears came to his eyes as he remembered that all the
present trouble hinged on Weaver.
There was a moment during the judge’s summing-up when something in
Proudfoot protested. What right had they to sit in judgment on him? “I
have understanding as well as you. I am not inferior to you. Yea, who
knoweth not such things as these?” That ridiculous wigged figure, immune
from insult, sitting aloft impersonating the divine justice. He felt
like telling it, “You old cuckoo, you wouldn’t be sitting there if it
weren’t that you are only half a man.”
The jury retired. How very long! It seemed as though they would never
come to a unanimous decision. He had hopes of disagreement,
procrastination, a new trial. But at last they came back, headed by the
foreman. He heard the clerk’s fateful question. He heard the answering
“Guilty.” There was no recommendation for mercy. Before he could take it
in he saw the “black cap” on the judge’s wig. “ ... hanged by the neck
until you are dead....” The judge and all of them seemed very far off in
the electric light, as if at the far end of a long hall. He could not
believe it, he did not believe it. Absurd! They were wanting to despatch
him, to liquidate his existence: whereas he was the world spirit
itself, the world spirit that descends into each living creature whole
and unsplit: as if each creature only mattered by itself and no other
creature. To be told that you are to be killed is therefore like being
told that the end of the world has come: impossible to fathom. They must
be under some error. They had forgotten that he was the world spirit
incapable of being quenched by a judge of that kind. The judge’s slender
hand moving up, the clerk removed the piece of black cloth from his
lordship’s wig. It seemed that all was over. The judge was thanking the
jury for the commendable manner in which they had carried out their
duties and was absolving them from further service for the next fifteen
years. He felt the warder’s hand on his shoulder; they led him down to
the cells; afterwards out into a taxi, the two warders inside with him.
He looked out of the window as they were wafted down busy streets; past
door porters at picture palaces who looked like major-generals; then
through shabbier streets. He still looked out. An auctioneer was
holding forth with gusto outside his shop, talking vociferously but
apparently to himself.
Then the bath at the prison. The kindness of the warders. It was like a
working men’s hotel. He could smile--and there was plenty of time--two
weeks yet or more. He now lived in the hope that the High Court of
Criminal Appeal would revoke the sentence. But the day came, and the
Lord Chief Justice gave it out as his opinion that he could find no
fault with the proceedings at the trial, and, speaking _ex cathedra_,
added some mordant comments of his own upon the class of novelists now
generally perverting the public. The friend who brought this news to him
consoled him with the lame remark that it was better to be hanged once
than to be imprisoned for a period of twenty years. After all, hanging
was more merciful.
“If it is,” exclaimed Mr. Proudfoot, feeling chilly at his friend’s
taking his death so philosophically, “if it is, and they are so
solicitous as to what is better for me, why don’t they let me make my
choice? I know what I would choose.”
“What?”
“Life imprisonment, of course. I am locked up, but I can still think, my
thoughts can still roam, my mind is still free and unfettered.”
“That is the cowardly choice, not the good choice.”
“I am only human,” said Proudfoot--and faltered.
There came a time, after the High Court had dismissed his appeal, when
he felt quite light and cheery in the confident anticipation of the Home
Secretary’s intervention. He thought of the Home Secretary as a man with
a soft grey moustache and kind eyes. But just as he had feared the suave
punctilio of the trial, he began to fear the sensitive, kindhearted men,
who, wincing in their sensibilities, would turn aside and leave it to
the other men to deal with the raw places. He read of the Home Secretary
going off for his customary week-end; he learnt of his solicitor
travelling to him with a batch of signatures, and coming back,
ambiguous in the extreme, only saying that the Home Secretary’s decision
would be duly published after his return to London from his week-end
holiday. Then he saw it in the morning papers. The Home Secretary could
see no ground for advising his Majesty to intervene with the normal
course of the sentence, and the papers further stated that the sheriff
had arranged for the execution to take place on the 22nd of this month,
and that on the morning of the 21st Hanbury, the executioner, would
travel to Liverpool to put up the gallows.
And then he asked--it was a desperate afterthought--that they should let
him finish his new novel. It was all but ready; he only asked two weeks’
respite. Secretly he hoped that it might be found so good that all the
writers and critics in the world and the Great British (Reading) Public
would see to it that he was granted life. It was an application truly
without precedent. But there was nothing lost by trying. There was still
time, and his solicitor got busy. The petition was drawn up and had
appended to it a long list of signatures from all the leading lights in
letters, music, art and science, some from the dramatic stage, and not a
few illustrious foreigners from France and Italy, even one from Poland
and Czecho-Slovakia. A German writer’s name was intentionally omitted
from the list, as it was feared that a certain daily paper would be sure
to cry out that opinion in this country was being dictated from Berlin,
and that the convalescent mind of our post-war public might echo the
cry, and the Government would find it difficult to grant the
application.
However, the respite was granted. It was his first success after a long
series of reverses. He had another two weeks clear to finish his book
in. Some newspapers, of the howling kind, duly howled against it. “What
Can Murders Teach Us?” was the headline of a certain Sunday paper. “Why,
to murder,” he could almost hear the responding voice of certain
readers. “Writers are worse than some other folk,” he could just hear
them saying it in Pedlar-with-Thresham. “Aye, they are a bad lot.” And
Mrs. Weaver answering, “That’s right.”
He remembered how she had sat in court, saying in reply to a question
put to her by counsel, “That’s right,” and never once looked up at him.
The book was got out with all haste. Three days before the execution it
was published, and his publisher sent him the first batch of reviews.
The stimulus given to it by his impending execution was tremendous. His
publisher recognised it as an invaluable advertisement and rose to the
occasion. For the first time in his life Mr. Proudfoot was a rich man,
and he made generous provisions for his father, for the few years that
he could yet be expected to survive. But the integrity of the British
reviewer is proverbial. The mere fact of Proudfoot’s impending death
could not influence their critical opinion of his work one way or
another. One critic wrote: “This book, while quite pleasant and
readable, is in no way remarkable.” And another critic, ignorant, it
would seem, of the fate involved, pleaded: “Go back, get you back to
your former style, and we shall listen to you till the crack of doom.”
He _had_ gone back; he had deliberately gone back on the advice of that
same critic, and in any case there was no looking forward now. But still
another critic wrote: “One would wish the author had begun to break new
ground, express life from a new angle....” The Great British Public was
silent as the grave.
The last hope had gone, and the last full day of his remaining life was
beginning to unfold itself. The warders, like old friends, played cards
with him all day to take off his mind from the event. In the little
intervals he wondered whether Hanbury who was to hang him on the morrow
was not perchance the man who bit off the heads of live rats whom he and
Weaver should have visited that fatal Sunday. Weaver had not disclosed
his name. But there were few hangmen, he knew, and this might very well
be the man in question. “Where does Hanbury, the hangman, come from?”
he inquired from the warder.
“Up Manchester way.”
It _was_ the man!
What emotions, what a multitude of moods he experienced in those few
brief hours. Till twelve he was sprightly and not very nervous. The
hangman, peeping at him through the observation hole, to decide what
“drop” to give him, saw him pacing up and down in the cell, puffing
calmly at a cigarette. But as, at midnight, the prison clock boomed out
the hours, he got agitated, threw away the cigarette and began counting
the remaining hours on his fingers. He tried to think of the noble souls
who went before him:--of Anton Chehov, who, after gravely saying to the
doctor who had been called to him during the night, “I am dying,”
drinking the glass of champagne prescribed to him to the bottom and
remarking, with a smile, to his wife, “It’s a long while since I have
had champagne,” turning over on one side, and presently being quiet for
ever;--of Goethe asking that the window might be opened to admit of
more air and more light, and the faithful Eckermann coming to look at
him, lying dead. “And I turned aside,” he records, “to give a free run
to my tears.” And with a shudder he recalled that _his_ body would fall
into lime to be instantly consumed like a foul thing. He must go not
knowing why he lived, and nobody in those bleak immensities would know
or care: no father, no mother, no love in the world would intervene on
his behalf; not even memory would be left him to recall his single spell
of life, as if he never had been, as if indeed he was never meant to
matter. There was but to “curse God and die.”
And suddenly his soul stirred within him, as if it had wings. “It’s the
end here,” he thought. “But it’s not the end there.” Weaver believed in
the world-soul--which meant that in a while he and Weaver would be one.
It was night, but he could not sleep. Perhaps now, all over the world,
there were people who could not sleep on his account and lay thinking of
him. As by imponderable wireless waves he, alone in the dark cell with
the gallows adjoining, felt himself linked to all compassionate souls;
and to them he sent greetings--his desperate greetings.... At last he
slept.
His sleep was troubled. He dreamt he had shrunk back from the pale gate
of death, a bleak coldness in his chest and limbs, and was going past a
park where there were children playing and people lounging wearily after
their strenuous day’s work. And he thought that the trivialities of
living were manna compared with death. But by the faces of the people
who came out of the park he knew that they, not realising it, could not
enjoy the gift of life. He walked on, and suddenly found himself in a
beautiful, totally unfamiliar part of the town, the existence of which
he had not even suspected. And he told himself how he would come home
and tell his father of it. He woke--and there was nothing to tell but
that he had dreamt it. And at once an incredible coldness invaded his
heart.
Besides, it was cold in the cell. Our courage is at its lowest ebb in
the early morning: it is wicked to hang people at dawn, he reflected.
The warder came in. “Get up. Here is your suit.” His old suit that knew
him in different circumstances. No collar to-day. “I’ll go and fetch you
yer breakfast now.”
Perhaps at the last minute the Home Secretary might ...? He remembered
seeing a film where also at the last moment, also the Home Secretary....
How cold. They wouldn’t tell his father. Or would they? The warder
brought in a tray with some cocoa and porridge and an apple. He could
not eat. He nibbled at the apple, and the savoury juice reminded him of
some utopian land of fruit and flowers, like Italy, which he had never
known. And he thought that when they had done their worst, and he was
left in peace, perhaps in dreamland he would fly to such a land.
He looked strangely at the warder. “Is it very bad? Does it ... hurt?”
he asked uneasily.
“No. A second--and it’s all over. Like having yer tooth out--no more.
All over in a wink.”
The chaplain, a young man, was more confused than he--and more
miserable. “Perhaps some spiritual consolation?” he stammered.
“I don’t understand,” said Mr. Proudfoot. “The indivisible universe
speaks and lives only through each separate creature, as if no other
creature existed at all. But it is the same indivisible universe which
so expresses itself. And they--absurd--they want to do away with
me--that means with the universe.”
“Perhaps a last communion....”
“Why?”
“Or a confession? After all, you’ve killed a human being.”
He thought of Weaver, and would have felt sorry for him if he did not
feel so overwhelmingly sorry for himself. If they’d let him off now he’d
put back what he had taken, put back into the spiritual cosmos what he’d
taken from it. If they would leave it to him, he’d see that humanity
did not lose.
He was brave, resigned. But a quarter of an hour before time, suddenly
he felt he wanted to live, love, breathe in through these nostrils the
fresh air of, not this, but other, future mornings, when _he_ would be
no more.... He remembered a windy day when the big chestnuts swayed and
lashed their branches like drunken things, and nuts and sticks fell off
like missiles aimed at passers-by. A little boy had turned round to his
mother, hiding his eyes from the dust and the wind in the folds of her
skirt. This had moved him then somehow. And now an intolerable thought
obsessed him that, when, in a few minutes from now, he would be buried
in a pool of lime, he would feel the wind no more. And he thought that
if this life he was leaving was the only life in a bleak universe, then
he could not face the anguish of leaving it. But if there was another
life, he wanted to hide his face in the lap of his Maker, hide from the
missiles that fell all about him and hurt him, weep on His breast, and
be quiet for ever....
But perhaps--two minutes yet--perhaps the Home Secretary ...? And before
he could realise it the hangman stood in the cell. Was this it? Was it
this? Was _this_, then, what he had to come to? Could mother but have
known! But the warder, who up to this had been like a friend and
confidant, suddenly began to shout at the executioner, “Come on, you
there, get a move on and get about it quick!” (as though anxious to get
the nasty job over). And Mr. Proudfoot felt almost as though his friend
the warder had betrayed him to that other man. That other man had a
soft, drooping, yellow moustache and glassy eyes, and seemed slow and
good-natured. You wouldn’t think by the mild look of him that he bit off
the heads of live rats. Somehow Mr. Proudfoot wanted to claim
acquaintance: to tell him about Weaver: that Weaver and himself were
about to call on him that fatal Sunday: if they had called he would not
now be here. But the man with his assistants and the warder were
resolutely coming up to him as if they were intent on making a swift end
of him, the governor, the chaplain and the doctor looking on. Yes, yes,
he would die--if they would leave him alone, or do it--handsomely. He
killed Weaver--however inadvertently, he killed him, and he would
forfeit his life, on his word of honour he would. But not so---- The
hangman and his assistant were trying to pinion him; and suddenly he put
up a fight for his life. What right had they? All nonsense apart, what
right? A glimpse of the jurymen all back in their homes, and at
breakfast, flashed through his brain. What right? Where he got the
strength from he did not know, but the prison bell was already tolling
for the soul departing, and its last stroke had boomed its melancholy
message across the yard into the streets, but Mr. Proudfoot was still
alive and struggling desperately with the executioner and three warders,
who only knew that they had to despatch him: he should have been
liquidated ten minutes ago: there was no document to account for his
unwarranted existence after 8 a.m. They were shocked: it was improper in
the extreme. “Don’t! Oh!” He wanted to tell them--if they would only
stop to listen--he wanted to tell them that--yes--he was a soul, a
universe with things in it which had nothing to do with that devil in
him they were intent on destroying. It was unjust. A whole universe.
“Stop! Think: what are you doing?... _No!_” he cried, struggling in
their grip and realising that nothing save his poor physical exertion
now stood between him and their grim determination to do away with him.
“No! You _mustn’t_!” he pleaded, his soul filled with a sickening animal
fear. But they dragged him on without respite, the chaplain leading the
way, reading words from the Bible. And if--he thought--there was a God
in heaven, why did He stand aside? What God was He to stand aside? “No!
No!... _Oh!_ ...” But they were dragging him on none the less, dragging
him on to his doom. Swiftly he looked at each of them, for a spark of
compassion. But they were all men who valued their duty before
everything else. He was in the open. And suddenly a wave of awe came
over him, standing as he did on the brink of eternity or extinction: so
that the hangman at his neck seemed like a friend who was assisting at a
parting, and those others, too, seemed as if they’d come to see him off
at the railway station as he was about to step into the train on his
awful journey; and he clung to them with fraternal, desperate farewell.
But they only looked as though they had no time for that, but wanted to
get the nasty business, long overdue, over at last. It seemed minutes
before he toed the chalk line on the drop--when suddenly he fell, it
seemed minutes, he expected it with drawn breath, the pulling up--when
_snap!_ it came!
And all was darkness.
* * * * *
The great harbour was awakening in the cold fog. From the terminus a
tramcar set off half empty. The conductor strode inside and began
collecting the fare. Then newspapers appeared on the street corners,
and posters announced in red and black letters:
“SPECIAL EDITION.
“PROUDFOOT EXECUTED.”
They were eagerly snapped up by busy hurrying people, who stopped and
read:
“Proudfoot had a quiet night and is believed to have been greatly
relieved at the end by confessing his crime to the chaplain. The
condemned man breakfasted lightly and walked with a firm step to
the scaffold. From the moment of prisoner leaving his cell to the
execution of the sentence there barely elapsed twenty-five
seconds.”