A Train of Powder (33 page)

It is true that there were two witnesses who confirmed the existence of the three men. One was a retired army officer who seemed odd to English eyes, because he was exactly like the American idea of an Englishman. Tall and rigid, with a long and fastidious face, and a voice strangled with punctiliousness, he gave evidence that he had once lived in the mews where Mr. Setty had his garage, and that it had rapidly degenerated from a citadel of respectability to a haunt of spivs. His head went back, his nostrils dilated. One saw the gipsies come in, some in black and some in yellow. He was of opinion that among the spivs there had been two called Maxie and The Boy, and one who had answered to the description of Greenie. This took us not very far; but the second witness was to take us much further. This was a man in his early thirties who described himself as a writer. He was an attractive young man, with thick golden hair, a sensitive face, and a well-bred voice. Before he gave evidence he looked round the court with a diffident smile which told that he liked being liked. He gave evidence which, if it were accepted, went far to making Hume’s story credible. He said that he had been in Paris the year before, and had got into touch with a gang engaged in the smuggling of arms into Palestine and automobiles into Britain. Two strong-arm men attached to this gang were known as Maxie and The Boy and answered to the description given by Hume. He had got into this company, he explained, because he had met a man in a nightclub who had offered to cash some travellers’ cheques for him, and so he had gone back with him to his hotel, at which place the obliging gentleman was arrested by the police; and the mere fact that he had been present at the arrest had made the other members of the gang accept him as one of themselves. He had collected a great deal of information about them and had sent a report about them to both the French Sûreté and the British Embassy. This last statement could be so easily verified that it compelled belief in his evidence. But alas, this was—let him be known as Philip—a poor soul born to vex a respectable family, well known to every contemporary amateur of crime by reason of his frequent convictions. Yet he is no criminal, merely one of the wild asses of the world, and nobody, not even the police, is ever very angry with him, though, to be sure, larceny and forgery and bigamy cause some inconvenience. It was most strange that he should have come out of safe obscurity and visited Scotland Yard, which for him was putting his head in the lion’s mouth, for the purpose of giving testimony in support of Hume’s story of the three men. He had never seen Hume in his life before, but there was a bond between the two of them. For Philip’s first conviction and Hume’s only conviction had been for the same offence: for unlawfully wearing military emblems and representing himself to be a member of His Majesty’s Forces. It is most probable that Philip did not know this when he volunteered to give testimony for Hume. These two naturally flew in the same flight, in bad weather and poor visibility, losing their bearings and diving so deep that the waters rushed up at them.

It would have been better for Hume if his wife had mentioned the three men when she murmured her evidence. But she, like the charwoman Mrs. Stride, gave testimony that wrecked both the case for the prosecution and the case for the defence. She declared that she had been in the apartment throughout the night when, according to the prosecution, her husband had stabbed and cut up Mr. Setty, and had seen and heard nothing unusual; but with equal, gentle firmness she declared that she had seen no three men in the apartment at the time when Hume said they had visited him. And her evidence was certainly true, for she had not sought to prove that she was away from the apartment on the night of the murder, which a perjurer in her position would certainly have done. Yet many people regarded her with suspicion. Even if Hume had merely received the parcels and put them in the coal cupboard, wouldn’t she, the housewife, have been bound to know something about that? And why hadn’t she asked her husband why he suddenly wanted the dining-room carpet cleaned, and where the rug in the hall had gone? These questions showed the prevailing ignorance of nearly all men and the more articulate kind of woman regarding the common lot of the inarticulate woman. A mother only three months past a dangerous confinement, who was feeding her baby and was worried about its illness, would be just getting round to the things she had to do, and would not be worrying about the coal cupboard, which was below eye level, and could only be inspected if she went on her knees. As for the carpet, it was light green, they had tried to buy, a dark green one when they were furnishing and had been unable to get one, so they had taken the lighter one and had promised themselves to have it dyed as soon as it got dirty, and it was dirty by this time, it had been down for over ten months. She had not asked why Hume wanted it dyed at that particular moment for the same reason that she had failed to ask where the rug had gone, because she was the kind of woman who accepts everything that men do. The creatures are irrational, but they are useful, and it might impair their usefulness to vex them with reasonable propositions. The disappearance of the rug, moreover, had appeared to her, when she hazily thought about it, as possibly to be explained by her husband’s habit of pawning things, which often sent her possessions away on temporary holidays.

But the suspicion that many men and some women felt about Mrs. Hume was derived not from dissatisfaction at her explanations of her conduct, but from their own reactions to her intense femininity. Her face, her body, her bearing, and, above all, her soft, preoccupied voice, made an allusion to something outside the context; and they believed this something to be the truth about the murder. One might as well suspect a tree that has blossomed because it is spring of making signals to another tree. What her whole being was alluding to, definitely though with dignity, was sex: the whole process, not short-circuited. When her eyes darkened, and she knitted her delicate eyebrows and then smoothed them out again and smiled, the suspicious imagined that she was thinking, “How terrible it was that night I helped him to wash out the bloodstains in the apartment, but thanks to the lawyers I have got out of all that trouble scot free.” But those who knew her, and these included some not unskilful in extracting secrets, were aware that at such times she was pondering such thoughts as these:

“This apartment is not very convenient now we have a baby. I wish we had a proper house, with a garden. Then I could put baby out in her pram to sleep in the mornings. And I could hang the diapers out to dry, instead of putting them on that horrible pulley outside the window, which is so stiff and heavy. Also, it would be more convenient for keeping the pram; I have to leave it on the stairs now, and people have to push past it. But I must not grumble. After all, Golders Hill Park is just up the road, and it is a very pretty park. It is a big house with beautiful gardens, and the London County Council has taken it over and keeps it just as it used to be before; you might think you were visiting a friend’s home. It will be nice, taking baby up there in the summer, when the band plays. And they have a little zoo there, with kangaroos. It will be amusing when baby is old enough to notice them.”

Her thoughts were not of this simplicity because she was stupid but because she was a pragmatist and these were the thoughts which were most useful for her to think in her present situation, while she was the mother of a young child. It was very difficult to make people believe that what seemed interesting and exciting to her about her life at present was not that her husband had been caught disposing of a corpse, but that she had just had a baby. Yet, when the bloodstained facts of history are considered, it is apparent that this must have been the standard feminine attitude throughout the ages.

She was a troubling figure to anybody who had begun to doubt the value of life as a thing in itself, who had decided that life ought to be rejected if it were this and not that. Passive and yielding and drowsy with the fatigue of doing all that has to be done for a young baby, she had the massive resolution of a battleship or a bomber. She meant life to go on, whatever it was like. That was how she came back into the case, at the very end. Her husband’s counsel, Richard Levy, had made a closing speech that put him in the first rank of criminal lawyers. He was already well known at the commercial bar, where the great fees are made, and much esteemed by his fellows; but this speech took him a stage further. What he did for Hume was not to expatiate on his story of the three men but to prove that the prosecution’s story was at least as vague, and cite the evidence of Mrs. Stride and Mrs. Hume as proof. It was a superb speech, as free from humbug and tricks as Euclid, and it lived in the memory by its logic and lucidity. It showed the strength of the best sort of Jewish mind, which becomes majestic as it pursues an argument, because justice is the product of sound argument, and Jehovah is a just God.

Nevertheless its majesty moved Mr. Christmas Humphreys to one last transport of what looked like indecorum but was acute spiritual distress. He could not abide the use that Mr. Levy made of Mrs. Hume’s testimony that she had seen no murder done in the apartment; he had used it as conclusive proof that no murder had been done. Mr. Humphreys said, “I am not prosecuting Mrs. Hume. I am not defending her. She is first and foremost the wife of the man she loves. There is a law older than the law of England or any man-made law; a man and a wife who love one another stick together. I do not say that Mrs. Hume had no part in this murder. I say I have no evidence whatsoever that she had any part in it. I certainly do not agree necessarily that she had no part in the cutting up of the body and the tidying up of the apartment. That is entirely a matter for you to consider if you wish.” These were strange words. They suggested to the jury that they should consider whether Mrs. Hume was guilty of murder or of acting as an accessory after the fact, though she had not been charged with either offence nor given an opportunity of being legally defended against such charges, and the jury had no means of expressing its conviction of her guilt, or, what was more important, her innocence. This left Mrs. Hume at the end of the trial in a position in which the process of justice should never leave anybody. This was peculiarly unfortunate, as there was not a shadow of evidence that she had committed any offence whatsoever. But there are philosophical divergencies which go deep. “Now let the unravished heart arise, and find Communicable light,” Mr. Christmas Humphreys remarks in one of his poems. But Mrs. Hume was the female whose heart, not to be ravished by any calamity, found communicable light and communicable shadow too, and went on producing life in its unreformed state.

When the jury disagreed and had to be discharged there ran through the court the relief which is always felt when a man escapes conviction on a capital charge, a relief which is not so much of the mind as of the bones and blood and nerves, feeling for their kind. But it was succeeded by distress. For one thing, it is in England something of a scandal, reflecting credit on no person connected with the trial, when a jury disagrees on a murder charge. It happens very rarely; nobody at the Old Bailey that day could call to mind more than two such cases in the last fifty years. Theoretically the Director of Public Prosecutions should not charge a man with a capital crime unless it has got enough facts to shape a story which a jury can either believe or disbelieve. But this odd crime had made it impossible for the prosecution to stick to this theory, for there were so many facts which made it look as if Hume had murdered Mr. Setty that it would have been giving a licence to murderers not to bring him to court.

There were, however, deeper reasons for discomfort. The position of man is obviously extremely insecure unless he can find out what is happening around him. That is why historians publicly pretend that they can give an exact account of events in the past, though they privately know that all the past will let us know about events above a certain degree of importance is a bunch of alternative hypotheses. But they find such hypotheses. Here, however, was a crime that was not in the past but in the present, and was much simpler than any important historical event. But it remained a secret: a secret which was in the hands of a talkative spiv, yet was unbreakable. If we could not find out the nature of a monstrous act which we knew to have been committed in the insubstantial shelter of Hume’s flat, we were more helpless than we had thought, and anything could creep up on us. It also made for misery to contemplate Hume. It seemed a symbol that two judges had sat on the bench, coming out of different centuries to try him, the one so like a medieval churchman, the other so visibly a man of our times, liberal and reasonable, and that there was no verdict. Hume could not be thought of as a coherent person, and made limbo a real place.

The legal situation created by the disagreement of the jury was tidied up within a few minutes. Another jury was sworn in, and Hume was again charged with the murder of Mr. Setty, and asked to plead, and he pleaded not guilty; then the prosecution announced that it intended to offer no evidence, and the judge directed the jury to return a verdict of not guilty. This procedure was not automatic. Two days later another jury, in the North of England, failed to reach a verdict after the trial of two men on a murder charge which lasted thirteen days, the longest murder trial that has ever taken place in Great Britain. The men were on trial again within a week, and one of them, a man named Kelly, was condemned to death and the other was acquitted, within a fortnight. But there was plainly no use retrying Hume’s case. Not that he went free. There was another indictment against him which charged him with being an accessory after the fact of murder; and he pleaded guilty to this offence, having confessed to it in his statement, and was sentenced to twelve years’ imprisonment. Then came the last strange feature of the case. It did not come to an end.