The Jury (40 page)

Simpson, consulting his watch, decided that Bonaker would not be coming. A newsboy with evening papers approaching his table, he bought one and glanced incuriously at the headlines relating to the Strood trial: ELOQUENT APPEAL BY STROOD'S COUNSEL—JUDGE SUMS UP—WOMAN FAINTS IN COURT. While Simpson turned the pages in search of something more interesting, Roger Coates strode majestically past the teashop on his way to Blackfriars Underground Station. As he joined the queue at the booking-office, as he flowed into the lift, as he entered his train and stood in considerable physical discomfort hanging to a strap, the hint of a smile played about his plump lips. For he had the advantage of his fellow-passengers. He was a man of destiny, an arbiter of fate. He had a secret of which these others—good people in their simple way, no doubt—were ignorant. Many of them were reading their evening papers, and some were almost certainly engrossed in the report of the trial,
the
trial. It was a profoundly satisfying thought. They were reading the summing-up: that is to say, such little miserable scraps of the summing-up as had been reported in the press. They were wondering, calculating, guessing (poor things!) what the verdict would be. But Mr Coates was in the know. He was the power behind the scenes. He knew something that wasn't in the papers, something that couldn't be in the papers since it had only happened fifteen minutes ago, something in which he himself had had a part. A part? Indeed yes. And a decisive part, what's more. They couldn't have done anything without him, his experience, his sagacity, his gift of seeing into the heart of a problem. After all the hard work he had put in on the case, four days of conscientious duty, it was strange to think that there would be no mention of
him
in the papers. But he didn't complain of that: not he. It was enough that he knew what these others did not know. He knew, and if he
so chose he could tell them. If you want to know the verdict, my friends, ask me: I was on the jury. But he did not so choose, for there was equal gratification in keeping them in the dark: it made him serenely master of the situation, a strong silent man who knew how to keep his own counsel. I should have made a pretty good barrister, thought Mr Coates, adjusting his wig, fingering the ribbons of his gown. Or a judge, for the matter of that: a bit of scarlet sets a man off. But one can't be everything, he concluded with a sigh: I've got responsibilities enough as it is. The thought of those responsibilities, that buying and selling in the city, made him thrust the proposal aside. No, he wouldn't be a judge: they must manage without him.

Roger Coates could see a joke as well as another, provided it was a reasonably broad one; but no inconvenient sense of the ludicrous lurked in the sanctuary of his secret mind (secret even from himself) where raged, perpetually, a hunger to believe that he was not the stupid, lying, ineffectual nobody that his parents and schoolmasters had too often, in the intervals of ignoring him altogether, declared him to be. The large self-confident gesture of his body, as he sailed along the road to his house, gave the lie to that long-buried slander. He was eager to be home and tell his tale, eager to see the faces of his wife and children and to breathe the incense of their astonishment and admiration. As he pushed open the gate and ascended the steps to the front door, latchkey already in his hand, he remembered, only just in time, that he was tired, a sensitive man much tried by a long nervous ordeal, a giant exhausted by prodigious and triumphant labours. But having stepped into the house and shut the door behind him he found weariness to be superfluous, for there was no one to witness it. No one, as he took his overcoat off and hung it on the hall-stand, came running to greet him; no voice called out: “Is that you, Father?” Disconsolate, he peered into the dining-room. No one. There was a light in the hall (wasting good current), but no fire in the dining-room, no other sign of habitation. A pretty fine thing, he said to himself, and at that moment (within twenty seconds of his arrival, though to him it seemed as many minutes) he heard a sound of movement below stairs. So that's where they are, he said
grimly. Living like a pack of servants as soon as my back's turned.

The sound he had heard was made by Marjorie dancing up the stairs from the basement. She now burst upon him. He suffered her embrace with dignity, and she led the way down to the warm kitchen, calling: “It's Daddy, Mother!” He followed in his own time, and paused in the doorway, merely to show that he was not to be hurried. He took in the scene at a glance—and the situation. So the wife's mother had turned up. I might have known! he thought bitterly. She'll be staying the night, no doubt. Very jolly, I
must
say. And on my first night home! He returned his wife's peck and stepped forward to greet the intruder.

“Well, Mother! How are you?”

“There's never much wrong with me, thank God,” said Mrs Henstroke. “You're looking well, Roger.”

Roger's smile made it plain that she had said the wrong thing and that he forgave her. He put a hand to his weary brow. “A little tired. Nothing more.”

“And hungry too, I expect,” said his wife placatingly. “I've got a nice supper for you, dear.” Awkward about Mother. But it can't be helped. He'll feel better after his meal.

“Have you?” said Roger. A shade too eagerly. “Well,” he sighed, “I'm not sure I shall be able to do justice to it.” They all looked at him. He read solicitude on every face, except young Vincent's, which was hidden by the newspaper he was reading. It seemed the right moment for his piece of news. “Four days of it. Rather wearing.” He paused before saying casually: “It was a murder case. The Strood case.”

“There!” cried his wife brightly. “We thought it must be that case you were on. Didn't we, Marjorie?”

“Oh, you did, did you?” said Roger. He felt deflated. His effect was ruined.

Young Vincent had pricked up his ears. “What's the verdict, Dad? Is he for the long jump?”

“He is not,” said Roger icily. “And that's not the way for my son to speak either. As a matter of fact we acquitted him.”

“Kind of you,” remarked Vincent coolly. “Especially as he probably did it.”

“Be quiet, Vincent!” snapped Vincent's mother. It was
her constant endeavour to keep Roger in a good humour. Nor was it a difficult task. Treat him the right way and he was the kindest of men. But Vincent, she sometimes thought, did everything he could to frustrate her wifely endeavour. “Can't you see poor Father's tired? … How horrid for you, Roger! Such an unsavoury case, too. You must have hated it, dear.”

“Unsavoury, yes,” agreed Mr Coates. “But we won't talk of that now,” he said, silkily discreet.

“You needn't mind Sis and me, Dad,” remarked Vincent cheerfully, “and our young minds. We've been reading it every day. Funny sort of chap, Strood. Look at the way”””

“Ah,” interrupted his father, “that's just where you go wrong, my boy.” In his eagerness for the ultimate triumph he forgot his resolve not to discuss dubious matters in front of the children. “I don't defend the man's morals, mind you. The least said about that the better. And it's a disgrace that children of mine should read such things. But that man wasn't being tried for his morals: he was being tried for murder. And you'd be surprised, Gertie,” he said, turning to his wife. “It's cost me the best part of a day's work to make 'em see that.”

“Make who see it?” asked Vincent.

“The jury, boy. Who else? Time and again I said to them: we mustn't allow ourselves to be prejudiced, I said. The question for us is, Did he or did he not poison his wife? Can we be sure, I said, that the poor woman didn't meet her death some other way? On the evidence before us, I said, can we be sure beyond all reasonable doubt? I put it to them one by one. People won't think clearly. They jump to conclusions. It was my conviction, right from the first, that the evidence wasn't good enough. And I told them so, straight from the shoulder.” Carried away by his story, for the moment, like the artist he was, Mr Coates believed what he said.

Gertie gazed at him with pride. She too had thought Strood guilty, but was instantly converted by her husband's eloquence. And it was nice to know that the poor young fellow wasn't to be hanged after all.

“On the first show of hands they were all for conviction,” said Mr Coates, after a moment's rapid thought.

“Oh, Roger!” said Gertie fondly. “And if it hadn't been for you …”

Mr Coates shrugged his shoulders, and smiled deprecatingly, disclaiming all merit. “Well,” he said modestly, “someone had to see fair play.” Glancing from face to face he encountered the strangely innocent gaze of Mrs Henstroke and was vaguely disquieted. But never mind her. “Well, Gert, what about this nice bit of supper you've kept for me? I believe I could manage a mouthful, after all.”

AT six o'clock, on the thirtieth of October, Roderick Strood had said to himself: Yes, I
will
go. All day, and for five previous days, he had debated the question. The idea, the fantastic idea, had been his heart's audacious answer to Elisabeth's announcement that on the thirty-first she must sail for America. She had sprung it on him very quietly and casually, with an air that gave him no excuse for protestations. Nor in fact were protestations reasonable. He had always vaguely known that her sojourn in England must come to an end some time. The fact had been too obvious to need stating: it had been implicit in everything she did and said. But Roderick, having diligently ignored the spectre, found himself unprepared for its sudden appearance, and bitterly resentful of the lumbering impersonal forces that were about to divide him from his hope of happiness. “But
of course
we shall meet again,” Elisabeth assured him, in answer to his agonized questions. In his heart he did not believe it. She is saying that to comfort me, as she would comfort a child. If she escapes me now, new interests will claim her—yes, and new lovers perhaps—and all that has been between us will remain with her only as a dream. Music is her first love. She had left him in no doubt of that, and because he too had an almost religious feeling for music he was content to have it so, knowing, or half-knowing, that this high impersonal devotion which was the light of her being, and which made her ultimately independent of himself, was part of the very quality he adored in
her: had she lost it, to lose herself in him, he and she both would have been the poorer, and the end of his passion for her would have been already in sight. Music was her first, her dominant love; and it would have caused him an agony of jealousy to believe that any new lover, superseding himself, could make her faithless to that.

Nevertheless she would go and she would forget. Not literally forget, but forget in the lover's sense: for a year or two her mind would retain a blurred picture of him, but her pulse would beat with emotions in which he had no part, her self would move exultantly into a strange future. To Roderick's romantic sense the tragedy of parting was not so much that it hurt as that it did not go on hurting for ever: better a hell of desire and regret, his heart cried, than craven submission to the medicine of time, that crowning insult to the human spirit! They would meet again, she said. But when? And where? In sober fact it was not impossible, nor even unlikely, that a meeting, somewhere in Europe, some time next year, could be brought about. But that prospect was all too remote to comfort him, though he clung to it for comfort. By next year, so much would have happened to her, so much would her stream of experience have broadened, that the love joining them now might seem to her no longer significant. She would be kind—but how terrible if she were no more than kind! How dreary if a miracle and a tragedy ended in the emptiness of anticlimax! So he began playing with the absurd notion of sailing with her. Absurd, because it would only postpone the parting by a few weeks, since he couldn't expatriate himself permanently. He refused, however, to look so far ahead; wilfully he allowed himself to drift with his irrational impulse.

And in time he succeeded in making it seem less irrational. If Elisabeth left him now, with this ache in his heart, the possibility of achieving a
modus vivendi
with Daphne would be infinitely small. Since that breakfast-table quarrel the situation at home had been intolerable, and he knew no way of mending it short of an hypocrisy, a carefully staged reconciliation garnished with comfortable lies, of which he knew himself to be incapable. He had lost heart for even a friendly approach: while Daphne's present mood endured, and while
he was unable to translate his obscure sense of guilt into an active repentance, it was hopeless to make any sort of appeal to her. Any such appeal must be based on the memory of old times, and even to hint of old times was something that she would resent as a cruel mockery, a driving of the knife deeper into her heart. Nowadays she moved about the house locked in her anger. With his child in her womb she fended off his attempts at conversation, with a studied politeness that was almost worse than the quarrel that had initiated it. He tried in his heart to meet anger with anger, telling himself that she had gone back on her agreement and that her infidelity cut deeper than his at the roots of their comradeship; but when he glanced at her cold shut face, which masked an hostility that owed much of its force to the affection it was bent on disavowing, he knew that self-justification was not enough, and that unless he could release her from her misery he had no alternative but to share it. Unless—and here his reasoning played into the hands of his impulse—unless he could get right away, beyond sight and knowledge of her. Perhaps, after all, a final breach was the only solution of the problem, the only honest and courageous way out. Perhaps only a moral weakness in himself, of which he was all too sharply aware, had blinded him to the obvious. And perhaps only that same weakness, with a pinch of egregious vanity added, had allowed him to persuade himself that he and Daphne could succeed (where so many others had failed) in keeping the ship afloat in these dangerous waters. Perhaps the crude common sense of mankind, with its insistence on a monogamy mitigated only by bland deceit, was right, and he, with his high-flown but dubiously disinterested idealism, a fool blundering after a false gleam.