The Jury (4 page)

“It's the Literary Society tonight.”

Mother received the information in silence.

“And someone's reading a paper on Wordsworth,” said Lucy, desperately.

“Indeed?”

“I expect it will be very interesting,” added the girl, with a forced lightness of tone. “I've always wanted to know about Wordsworth. You know, Mother. The poet.”

“It's a long time since I read any poetry, dear,” said Mrs Prynne, with a hint of reproach.

The subject seemed dead. But after a long pause Lucy was horrified to hear herself say, in a trembling voice: “Mother, would you mind very much if I went to the meeting tonight? I could be in by ten at latest.”

Blushing, she met her mother's glance, but dropped her eyes quickly at sight of that strange sad smile.

“I
had
rather looked forward to seeing something of my daughter tonight,” confessed Mrs Prynne, with gentle resignation. “But if you
want
to leave Mother, Mother won't stand in your way, dear. You know that.”

“Oh, it doesn't matter,” answered Lucy quickly. To hide her disappointment she gathered the used plates into a pile and carried them into the scullery. There she stayed for a moment, bent over the sink. And presently the picture of Mr Seagrave faded from her mind, and she found herself looking, with fear and hatred, into the dark commanding eyes of Father.

STARING into his shaving-mirror Brian Goodeve said to himself: “It is impossible that she should love me.” But his blood, quickened with desire, made nothing of that specious argument. His was not, whatever he might think or feign to
think, an ill-favoured face. It was young, pale, a little gaunt; and the chin, even when newly shaved, lived in the dark aura of the beard he so despairingly battled with. Occasionally, too, his flesh had a raw look; occasionally a pimple appeared; and these disasters, timed (it seemed) to occur whenever a meeting with Daphne was in prospect, were capable of sapping his courage and of precipitating a mood of bitter self-depreciation. Yet personal beauty was not, he told himself, the chief attraction that a woman desired in her lover; and when Daphne was with him his fears would always vanish out of mind in the tumult of his emotions; she, and she only, had the power to make him forget himself. Moreover, however impossible it might appear to cool reflection, she had given signs of love which not even he could explain to his disadvantage.

That she, a thing enshrined and sainted, a being of such exquisite delicacy, should give her heart to an impecunious and socially inexperienced young man like himself was impossible; but it was true. So sensitive was he about his respectable but undistinguished antecedents that he winced from making comparison, even in his secret mind, between himself and her in that particular respect; but, whether he confessed it or not, his passion was greatly augmented by gratitude to her for not minding that he was the son of a Midlandshire tradesman, while she … But of Daphne's origins he had made no question, taking it for granted that they were rich and strange and of an impeccable gentility. With an awkward, a too eager honesty, he had blurted out all the truth about himself: that he had come to London to seek his fortune, fortified by nothing but his ardent literary aspirations and an allowance of a hundred and fifty a year from his father. And she had received the dreadful secret without turning a hair, telling him that he was very lucky and how she wished she could write poetry too. But she had done more than that: she had introduced him to a man who knew a man who knew an editor, and from this editor, from time to time, he picked up little jobs of reviewing. In his gratitude to Daphne, which had preluded this consuming flame of love, he couldn't quite forget, however, that it was Strood who had first taken notice of him, had liked his poems (several of which
had appeared in the weeklies), and encouraged Daphne to ask him to the house.

He couldn't forget that, much as he wished to. For some weeks now he had declined all her invitations to dinner, insisting that they should meet either in his own rooms or on neutral ground.

“Darling, how sweet of you!” she said, mocking him. “One of these days I shall hear you saying to Rod: Sir, my feelings for your wife make it impossible that I, as a man of honour, should continue to avail myself of your hospitality. … Is that the idea?”

Brian laughed. “Something like that,” he admitted. “Don't you feel the difficulty yourself?”

She ignored the question. “So old-world of you, Brian. We've changed all that. … And if you say
Plus ça change,
I shall scream.”

“It's the inevitable comment,” said Brian. “Hackneyed, but true.”

“It's not true. People are more sensible nowadays than they were in our fathers' time. I don't say jealousy has ceased to exist——”

“Don't you, Daphne?” said Brian. “I thought you did.”

“I don't say anything so absurd as that,” Daphne went on, quelling him with a look. “But it
is
true that we're getting more civilized. More tolerant and less possessive. Married people are beginning to learn the logic of freedom.”

“All the freedom
I
want,” said Brian, “is the freedom to be married to you.”

“Foolish one!” she murmured fondly. “You'd soon get over that if you
were
married to me.” She waited for his repudiation of this blasphemy, and did not wait in vain. “But, you know,” she warned him teasingly, “to me you're a mere child. I'm older than you.”

“By precisely ten months and three days,” said Brian. “I've told you——”

“So you have, darling,” agreed Daphne, “but I don't mind hearing it again.”

Fragments of conversation such as these floated through his mind as he stood in front of the shaving-mirror and lathered his offending face. A thousand small remembered
moments—enshrining a trick of speech, a tone of voice, a word, a look, a gesture, the way she peeled her gloves off, the way she turned her head at a question, the enchanting asymmetry of her lips when she began to smile—these things made up the sum of her in his mind. But she was not the mere sum of her qualities, as he well knew: she was a living spirit and she loved him. Tremendous, impossible, undeniable fact! By loving him she made him life-size who had always been too ready to believe himself insignificant, ineffectual (ineffectual in action, that is: for behind all his self-depreciation lived the calm conviction that somewhere in the depths of his being there was a Shakespeare, only waiting for release); had imparted a new virility to his step, a new clearness and candour to his eye, a new confidence to be seen in the very poise of his head. He even wielded his razor more expertly, for no better reason than that Daphne had declared she loved him.

It was six o'clock (Greenwich time) on a bright cool evening during the last week of May. On the waters of the Neckar, in a little dinghy painted a bright blue, Roderick Strood and Elisabeth Andersch drifted on the golden tide of their dream. In the moment when Roderick shipped his oars and leaned forward to look more deeply into the eyes of his companion, Daphne refolded and re-enveloped a letter she had been reading, Brian Goodeve dipped his razor in hot water, and Mr James Bayfield, of Peckham Rye, told Ernie to shut the shop-door. Expectation ran like fire in Brian's veins. All day he had tried to ignore the thought consuming him; the hope, the all-but-knowledge, that Daphne, visiting him in his rooms this evening, would give him at last that which hitherto, through some fine-drawn scruple, she had withheld. He contemplated the prospect of that ultimate intimacy with a rapture more than half mystical, the tumult in his blood being, by promise of fulfilment, held in the leash of awed adoration. Having completed his toilet he cleansed and stropped the razor, washed the brush, screwed the top on the tube of shaving cream, and put everything back in its place, lingering over every operation with an almost finicking care, so that the time might seem to pass more quickly. That this deliberating tidiness was no part of his ordinary habit was
shown, all too clearly, in the general disorder of the bedroom. The appearance of the place struck sudden panic in him, and with a controlled frenzy he set about putting things straight. Nothing he could do, however, would avail to make his apartments seem elegant to the eye of a woman accustomed to comfort. He knew bitterly that the place must seem to her fastidiousness little better than squalid. His two rooms ('with kitchenette', as the advertisement had said) were as drab as the district in which they were situated. The walls of the sitting-room he had stripped of their pink cabbage-roses and covered with a cream distemper, but the bedroom retained a wall-paper which seemed, by the mere fact that he hadn't positively died of it, to accuse him of tastelessness. A decent Van Gogh reproduction over the sitting-room fireplace, a bit of gaily coloured pottery on top of the bookcase, a few well-sprung easy-chairs, and a carpet costing, say, twenty-five pounds—these would have made all the difference between unromantic bareness and bright bohemian poverty. Brian looked about him with discontent. But the discontent was a matter rather of habit than conviction. Daphne had seen the place often enough and accepted it. If her private reaction had been one of distaste, no hint of any such thing had appeared in her manner. Which only shows, said Brian to himself, what breeding can do for a woman. He got into his accustomed chair, picked up a book, and set himself to forget the storm of expectation in his heart. Daphne looked up at him from every page.

Soon he abandoned the pretence of reading and gave himself up to anticipating the sweet, impulsive, passionate things he would say to her. But when she came in fact, he could at first say nothing at all. The sight of her struck him dumb, and every nerve in his body tingled with delight when she lent herself indulgently to his embrace. Indulgently: and he was enchanted; content, now he had her in his sight, to be patient, to wait until she, throwing aside her languor as she had thrown aside her cloak, should give herself, with him, to the love that he felt to be hovering above them, making their hearts one. But when, preceding him into the sitting-room, she half-turned to him again, with the full light of that glowing evening on her face, he saw with a shock that something
had happened. Instead of giving voice to the thought, he tried cunningly to ignore it, and quickly, as if to cut off her escape, he said: “Darling, this is marvellous. The beginning of the world.”

He would have seized her again, but she evaded his arms, saying: “Let me sit down for a bit. I'm tired.”

“Didn't you have a taxi?”

“Yes.” She looked at him half-defiantly. “But it's quite possible to be tired even after a taxi-ride.”

He refrained from answering, lest he should be betrayed into tears and be shamed in her sight for ever.

Noticing his silence, she glanced at him in a way that was almost furtive. “Brian, I hope you're not going to mind too much.”

With dry lips he asked: “What do you mean?” But what she meant was already in his mind, a hideous fear awaiting the seal of her word.

“I mean I want you to be sensible, my dear,” she said. “I've had a letter from Roderick,” she went on, in a cold voice. “It seems he's picked up a young woman in Germany, if you please.”

Brian stared blankly. “What's that got to do with us?”

Daphne gave no sign of having heard the question. “It's the letter of a child, a romantic schoolboy. He actually talks of marrying her. If you ever heard of such a thing!”

Brian jumped out of his chair. “But, Daphne! Darling! What could be better? You'll divorce him and we can get married. Why—don't you see! It's the very best thing that could have happened.”

He came towards her with outstretched hands. She turned her head away with a gesture of impatience.

“Please, Brian! I'm not in the mood for sentimentalities.”

The room spun round him. “What did you say, Daphne?”

“If you and Roderick imagine that I'm going to be pushed aside like that, you're mistaken, both of you. The first pretty face he sees, and I'm superseded.”

“Did you say
sentimentalities?”
asked Brian. His voice was hard.

“Besides,” she went on, “there's Roderick to be thought of. I'm very fond of Roderick. I can't let him fail into a trap
like that. Of course if he really loved this woman, and if she were a really nice woman, I wouldn't stand in his way for a moment.”

“And isn't she a nice woman?” asked Brian dangerously. “What makes you think so?”

“No nice woman tries to steal another woman's husband,” retorted Daphne, her voice rising. After a tense silence her demeanour suddenly changed. “Poor Roderick!” she said, with a smile. “He's never looked at another woman in his life. We've been married nearly eight years now, and I know my Roderick. He's very simple really, in spite of his brains. Musician he calls her. He would, the poor darling. She's probably some little piece out of the chorus.”

Brian waited, in a kind of trance, for her speech to end. Then he said, with mechanical precision: “Was it last week or the week before?”

Daphne became aware of him. She seemed almost surprised to see that he was still there. “What are you talking about, Brian?”

“You told me,” said Brian, “how glad you would be if Roderick could find happiness with some other girl, a happiness, you said, such as you had found with me. Was it last week or the week before?”

Daphne's eyes flashed with anger. She rose from her chair. “If you want to score debating points I'll go, before we start quarrelling.”

“Sit down! Sit down!” Seeing a gleam of alarm in her angry eyes, he realized, with sudden shame, that he was shouting at her, threatening. “Oh, God!” he cried, and flung himself into a chair, burying his face in his hands. He heard her voice as from a great distance.