Part 5

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.