The Jury (33 page)

“More than if it was freehold,” he assured her. “It's better than freehold: it's what they call fee-simple.”

“What's fee-simple?”

“I don't exactly know,” confessed Arthur, “but I do know it's better than freehold. If the King himself wanted this bit of land off us he couldn't have it, not without paying. Couldn't turn us out, not the King himself.”

“Well, p'raps he won't try, dear,” said Nellie. “Where shall we get our water from?”

“There's to be a well dug. Hartop's seeing to that.”

“I suppose there's plenty of farms near?”

“Expect so. Why?”

“Oh, nothing. But we might like a drop of milk with our tea sometimes.”

Arthur stared admiringly. “Trust a woman to think of things.”

That piece of extraordinary foresight confirmed him in the conviction that Nellie was the best wife a man could have, as well as the most taking. Nor had he seriously doubted it since. There had been bursts of temper and disputes between them, but no full-dress quarrels; impatience and exasperation, but no radical unkindness. And if some of its features fell far short of the bliss that imagination had promised, this new life yielded other satisfactions that had been impossible to anticipate and remained impossible to define. There was something about the smell of the morning when you put your head out of the window to make sure that the acre was still there, and, for the eyes of a young husband ploughing his way home after a day's work, there was the sight of smoke curling from the chimney of a small wooden house in the green valley, three fields away.

Arthur and Nellie on Sundays, and Nellie alone in spare hours throughout the week, diligently dug into the acre and cultivated potatoes, cabbages, carrots, celery, beet, scarlet runners, gooseberries, and red currants. They also kept 'a few chickens', and later on they acquired a goat, a beast so active and voracious that it had to be tethered on a stout chain, which, at nicely chosen intervals through the night, just when a fellow was dropping off again, rattled violently under the bedroom window. And it was all very well to say move it (he said to Nellie, damning her unreasonable reasonableness), but the wretched animal had got to have some sort of shelter from the wind, these cold nights, and they couldn't afford to build a special place for her ladyship. The goat, though with evident reluctance, yielded enough milk for their needs and so spared Nellie a daily expedition across fields—generally muddy—to the nearest farm. And goat's milk, they had heard, was good for babies, far better than cow's.

Soon, and sooner than they had at first intended (“for if we wait till we can afford it we shall die waiting”, said Arthur sagely), there was a baby in prospect: no longer a mere dream, but a mysterious entity giving definite signs of existence. Nellie became afflicted with sick feelings, not only in the mornings, but at intervals throughout the day; and it was found by experiment that this meant hunger, or anyhow that the taking of food, a little and often, would ward it off. So nowadays they never went for their long Sunday walks (for they refused to be slaves to their acre, much as they delighted in it) without taking sandwiches with them and a thermos flask filled with hot milk. “George hasn't half got an appetite,” said Arthur, grinning. “Eat us out of house and home he will.” His fancy raced ahead, to entertain pictures of the child running about in the acre, shouting and laughing with pleasure in precisely those things that gave his father pleasure: the elastic quality of the turf, the dew on the grass, the wooded hills of the southern horizon, the vivid changing sky, and all the intoxicating aliveness of nature. Nellie agreed that you couldn't wish for a nicer name than George, but sometimes in their fancy the child was a girl, whom they called Vera, which was Nellie's second name. Nellie always thought of George or Vera as a tiny plump baby, delicious and helpless;
but Arthur's visions were of a five-year-old, someone you could play with and hoist on your shoulder without fear of breakages. Often, on his return from the shop, he saw young George or little Vera running across the field to meet him. It was going to be a costly business, but who cared? The months went slowly by; Arthur's pride and excitement grew; and towards the end he could think of nothing but the coming baby, until one morning, three weeks before the expected arrival, Nellie came to him with grey face and limp hands and collapsed into his arms.

When they told him that the baby was dead in her womb, and she in danger, he spared no more thought for George or Vera, though their ghosts haunted the acre. Nor did he mention them when at last, the day after the operation, he was allowed to see Nellie. Instead, he gave her a circumstantial account of the behaviour of Nancy the goat when he had tried to milk her. Nellie did not so much as smile at his nonsense, but she looked one degree less forlorn by the time he left her, and that, said Arthur to himself, that's a start anyhow. After five weeks alone in the wooden hut he shut the place up and cleared out, to take possession of a four-roomed cottage on the outskirts of Whinley, within twenty minutes' walk of his shop. To this cottage Nellie came at last. She was not yet her old self. “What do we want four rooms for?” was her first comment. And Arthur felt a blunderer, for he knew that now there could never be more than two in the family. Swallowing his disappointment, for he had hoped to please her, he took her hand and drew her into the kitchen.

“See what's here,” he said. “The kitchen, see? A sink, what's more. Two taps, hot and cold.” He watched her anxiously out of the corner of his eye, waiting for her to see something else than the sink.

“Why, what's this?” asked Nellie. “Oh, Arthur, isn't it pretty?”

“Oh,
that,”
said Arthur, cunningly. “That's only a kitten.” It was, however, the loveliest kitten that Nellie had ever seen, a golden tabby measuring about seven and a half inches from tip to tail.

“Like him?” said Arthur, with an air of indifference tempered by surprise. “Well, he's not a bad kitten, as kittens go.
Nuisance about the house, rather. Doesn't know his manners.”

“But where did you get him, Arthur?”

Arthur had acquired the kitten by simple purchase. “Found him in the street, straying. Starved, too, by the look of him. And he wasn't half frightened,” added Arthur, with a brutal laugh. “Of course we don't have to keep him. I dare say one of my customers'll give him a home.”

“What shall we call him?” asked Nellie. “Silas,” she answered herself quickly, picking on a name at random, in her haste to avoid remembering the name she must learn to forget. “He's
alive,”
said Nellie softly, renewing a forgotten moment, twenty years away, when, as a child, she had held a kitten in her arms for the first time, and found it so much more lovely and exciting than even the loveliest of dolls.

The Cheeds were childless. Whereas Roderick Strood … how could Arthur feel pity for a man like that? Pity he did feel, but horror and something like hatred were uppermost.

He scowled. He said: “Guilty.”

Charles Underhay passed the question round the table.

“Guilty.”

“Guilty.”

“Guilty.”

There were two more to vote. Bayfield was one of them. The jury had been in conference for precisely four minutes.

THERE was a sudden silence in the jury-room, and a strong current of excitement began flowing among the twelve, an excitement born of a sense not so much of crisis as of solidarity and power. For a moment the jury was one: from the fusion of those separate psyches a new being had emerged, a group-spirit, an emotional monster in whose godlike power all personal inadequacies and impotencies were lost. Its eyes glittered, it breathed delight, it swelled and swelled until the whole earth was full of its glory. It gave itself with shuddering pleasure to the contemplation of the blood-rite,
the sanctified vengeance, to which it was dedicated. In that moment the session became a love-feast, garnished with the intoxicating spices of cruelty. The jury, in all its members, felt the rising tide of a lust to which, as individuals, they believed themselves to be strangers. The mob-soul, seizing its brief chance, achieved definition. Humanity was eclipsed, civilization in abeyance.

But the moment passed. The monster disintegrated, as one by one the individuals composing it came back to life. With a sense of emerging from a strange orgy, of which the memory at once attracted and repelled them, they became conscious once more of where they were and what they were at: of the green-washed high walls and bare polished table of the jury-room, and of the task before them. Beginning more or less by chance at Lucy Prynne, who was situated at 9 on the clock-map, Charles had sent his question travelling anti-clockwise round the table, ending at Oliver Brackett (3 o'clock), Major Forth and Clare Cranshaw having already voiced their opinion. Bayfield and Bonaker to the right of him, sitting at 10 and 11 o'clock respectively, he had momentarily forgotten, and now, remembering them with a start, he deliberately refrained from repairing the omission. He was a little disconcerted by the result of his canvass, for it seemed to him unseemly that a decision, even though he agreed with it, should be so swiftly arrived at, without discussion and on a capital charge. He would never be able to face the Judge, and pronounce the verdict, after an interval so indecently brief. Indeed it was only Gaskin's importunity that had harried him into putting the question at all at this early stage.

“Well,” he remarked nervously, hardly daring to face the company, “this unanimity is very surprising.”

“Very gratifying, I should say,” said Cyril Gaskin, with a meaning glance at Bayfield, followed by a winning smile for the ladies.

Oliver Brackett had already taken a dislike to Gaskin. The bland confidence of the fellow put his back up and provoked him to make difficulties.

“I suppose there's no doubt about it, is there?” he asked diffidently, addressing the company in general. His theatre was closed down for a while. He had just enacted the execution
on that secret stage; had stood blindfold on the scaffold, listening to the voice of the chaplain and waiting for the drop; had adjusted the knot with his ready, hangman's fingers. And now there was a lump of nausea in his throat, and he was conscious of a foul contagion in the air about him.

“That's just the question, isn't it?” said his neighbour, Coates: rather cleverly, in his own opinion. “I don't wish anyone any harm,” continued Mr Coates, “but it's a clear enough case to me. And some of us have got businesses to attend to.”

“That's right,” said Mr Nywood. “We can't do the poor chap any good by hanging about.”

“We've only got to use our common sense,” contributed Mr Bayfield.

“Good idea,” said Bonaker.

“Exactly,” cried Cyril Gaskin, taking possession of the floor. “I'm sure,” he went on in a honeyed voice, “I'm sure none of us like the job we're on. Speaking for myself, I know I'd give a lot to be relieved of it. But we've got our duty to society, and we must really make up our minds, ladies and gentlemen, to be a little, well, shall I say,
brave
about it. Yes, brave. The ladies, as we all know, have very tender hearts. We honour them for it. Personally speaking, and I think I shall carry the gentlemen with me in this, I very much wish this dreadful decision could have been left to what I may perhaps call the sterner sex. We've got our duty to society——”

“You've said that before,” said Bonaker, in a loud but not unfriendly voice.

Cyril turned to him with a sickly smile. “Thank you, my friend. And I say it again.”

“Just as you please,” said Bonaker cheerfully. “Thought you'd like to know though …”

“As I was saying——” Cyril went on.

“In case it was an accident,” explained Bonaker.

Cyril reddened. To be treated like this in the presence of the ladies! “Will you allow me to speak, sir?”

“Go ahead,” said Bonaker. “Society.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Society,” repeated Bonaker. “You were telling us about society.”

It was impossible to know whether the fellow was being
deliberately rude, or merely clumsy. There was a massive simplicity about him that made the second theory the more probable. And yet …

“What I can't get over”—Sidney Nywood joined in—“is that wireless business.” He scratched his head thoughtfully: a trick his wife had often told him about. She didn't like the undertaking business and she didn't like to see a man scratching his head. A woman so full of well-off notions took a good deal of living up to, but Sidney didn't let it worry him. “All right, old girl!” he would say. “Have it your own way.” But she didn't like that either. “Old girl,” it seemed, was a low way of speaking. “Well, you know best,” said Sidney. And he meant it. He himself had no claim or aspirations to refinement: all he wanted was a steady comfortable income and no worry. But he respected such aspirations in others, and especially in Flo. He made no secret of his conviction— and hers—that Flo was a good cut above him. He was proud of her superiority; he boasted of it; it was almost his only point of vanity. “Course, the wife, she's a lady,” he told his friends. “She's too good for a chap like me, really. But she don't complain, not her. That's where it comes in, don't you see? There's some that
would
complain.” When neighbours dropped in for a chat (which was all too seldom nowadays, for there didn't seem to be time to be sociable as you got older), when for example Mr Cattel dropped in, there was nothing that pleased Sidney more than to set Flo at her piano-playing. “P'raps Mr Cattel would like a tune, Flo,” Sidney would say, in a voice hesitating between heartiness and timidity. And then, if Flo felt in the mood, they would switch off the wireless, with its Bach and its Beethoven and its Herman Finck, and have either
List to the Convent Bells,
or
Melody in F,
and very often both.
Melody in F
was Sidney's favourite, and he never tired of hearing it, at least in Flo's rendering. After all, it wasn't everyone that possessed a piano; and fewer still possessed a wife who could play it so loud and fast. And you couldn't expect a woman like Flo to see eye to eye in everything with a man like himself. She was all for doing things on a grand scale, buying land and building rows of houses and feathering the nest in a dignified way. But Sidney's ventures in this line were seldom successful. “There's no
money in property,” he told her, again and again. “That's because you're too soft with people,” Flo retorted. “You seem to want to work for next to nothing.” But soft though he was, and proud though he was of Flo's gentility, it did not occur to him to change his ways in order to accommodate himself to her point of view. He was humbly unyielding when it came to a matter of business, holding, as he did, that just as it was part of a wife's office to nag a little, and especially a wife who was the daughter of a linen-draper in such a big way of business that he had ruined himself, so it was a good husband's job to listen patiently and take no further notice. It does her good to have her say, thought Sidney, but there are some things a man knows best about. “Tell you what, Flo,” he said one day. “You take over the business, fix up the contracts and all that, and I'll do the mending and cooking.” That was his sole excursion into irony, the nearest he ever got to 'answering her back'. But with all this he knew well enough that she was fond of him, and in that knowledge he was content.