The Jury (17 page)

“I don't quite——” he began.

“I think I'm going to have a child,” said Daphne. “In fact, I know I am.”

Roderick stared. “Are you sure? Have you seen Cartwright?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I'm damned!” said Roderick. Shocked into sincerity, he could not conceal his dismay. It was as if he heard the door clang behind him, the jailer's key turned in the lock.

Daphne watched him with quivering lip. “Is that all you can say?”

“I'm sorry, Daphne,” he said. “But you must admit it's rather ironical, to put it mildly. Here we've wanted a child for eight years and never had one. And now …” He shrugged his shoulders, leaving the rest to her.

“And now you
don't
want one. I see.” Daphne gripped the edge of the table. At that moment, being hurt and frustrated, she wanted nothing so much as to hurt him in return. “I
suppose it's never occurred to you to wonder
why
I haven't conceived before during those eight years?”

A hint of her meaning flashed on him. “Well? Why?”

“Because I took care to prevent it.”

He got out of his chair. “You've cheated me.”

“And now,” she added, with frenzied calm, “I've taken care not to prevent it.”

“Very clever indeed. I congratulate you.”

“But you needn't be afraid,” said Daphne. “You're free to go when you like. Today if you like. Run off to your pleasures, leaving your wife pregnant. It will be quite a revelation to your friends, won't it? I wonder what Cradock will say. And your father.”

With bent head Roderick moved towards the door, saying irrelevantly: “When's that damned coffee coming?”

Mrs Tucker entered at that moment, nearly colliding with him. She entered without noise and deposited her tray on the breakfast-table. Mrs Tucker could be very silent when she chose.

AT nine o'clock on an evening in October a message for Roderick Strood was broadcast in the hearing of some millions of his countrymen. It caused anxiety to his friends, and excited a certain degree of curiosity among those of his more casual acquaintances who happened to hear it; but to the overwhelming majority of listeners it meant nothing. Among these latter were Mrs Cranshaw, Oliver Brackett, Roger Coates, Sidney Harrington Nywood, and Arthur Cheed, all of whom took it for granted that the matter was no concern of theirs. For a mistake so inevitable they cannot be blamed.

Sidney H. Nywood, as his billheads described him, had had a tiring day. A bit of luck, in the shape of a funeral, had fallen to him, and the nervous strain of seeing that all went off nicely, and more particularly of making a public appearance in his silk hat and frock coat, made him more than commonly
grateful for the peace of his little parlour, the comfort of his arm-chair, the fire in the grate, and the sight of Laddie stretched out at ease on the hearthrug. He had left Flo in the kitchen, busy at her ironing, and now, as his ears told him, she was doing the day's washing-up. There was time for a nap before she joined him at the fireside, and he sat with eyes closed, fragments of thought and dream drifting in and out of his mind. The radio at his elbow was reading him a lecture on the care of gardens in autumn, but he paid no attention to that. He liked a noise in the room, so long as it wasn't too loud: it was companionable and nice and you weren't obliged to listen. He wasn't listening now: he was thinking, in a disjointed fashion, of the funeral, and Mrs Newsky's roof that wanted seeing to, and the drop of stout he'd have when Flo came in, and how Laddie seemed to be smelling a bit more than usual tonight.

Flo had funny ideas. She was always at him to give up the undertaking part of the business, and keep to what she called his proper job, that of builder and decorator. But where was the sense of quarrelling with your bread and butter? After all, someone had got to bury people, you couldn't leave ‘em lying about, and the more he left it to others the worse it'd be for his balance-sheet at the half-year. That's what came of marrying a refined girl. Not that she wasn't a good girl, talker or no talker. Undertaking wasn't everyone's choice. Naturally enough. But what Sidney H. Nywood most disliked about it was not the job but the fancy togs. He couldn't get used to that top-hat. It had served him for ten years and he still couldn't get used to it, and it was hard work pretending not to know that some of the neighbours laughed to see him in it, to see him looking, as he knew he did, like something out of a farce. But what the corpse's relatives would say if he wore anything less customary was more than he cared to think about. Nevertheless he began to think about it, and on the tide of that speculation he was floating away into dreamland, easily and luxuriously floating away, when something, some sudden catastrophe, recalled him to wakefulness.

He opened his eyes and looked round in perplexity. What had happened? Things didn't seem the same somehow. Ah, yes … his brow cleared. What had happened was silence:
the voice on the radio had ceased. Not like home at all. Funny how you got used to a thing. But, mercifully, the silence did not endure. “There is one SOS before the news,” said the radio into Mr Nywood's ear. “The name is Strood. Will Roderick Strood, who left home yesterday evening, return at once to his house in Merrion Square, where his wife, Daphne Strood, lies dangerously ill?” That's better, thought Mr Nywood. If only I can lose myself for a minute I shall be another man. Snuggling into his chair again, he closed his eyes contentedly, to be lulled to sleep by changes in the Cabinet and rumours of a European war.

Arthur Cheed, on the other hand, who kept a garage some seven miles east of Mr Nywood's workshop, always made a point of listening attentively to the news bulletin. As a conscientious citizen he felt it his duty to take a lively interest in everything uttered by the voices that haunted the ether. In a dogged ineffectual way he worried a great deal about the always alarming international situation. His hatred of violence was so strong that the mere thought of it sometimes filled him with a kind of blood-lust. Now and again he came within an ace of realizing that his interest in larger things was due in some measure to the fact that there was a lamentable dearth in his life of the smaller and more personal interests that occupied his easy-going, unpolitical neighbours. He and Nellie were childless, and had lost hope of children. In default of children they kept two handsome tom-cats. His was a blue Persian called Henry. Nellie's, a golden tabby, answered to the name of Silas. Most of the conversation in that household of two centred on Silas and Henry; much of it, indeed, was attributed to them. “Does Henry like his milk pudding? Yes, he says, got any more, Mother? What a cheeky boy!” This game was Nellie's invention, but Arthur played it with equal relish. “Silas says Father must go and change his wet clothes. Can't have you catching cold, Father, he says, or where's my milk to come from?” And so on: there was no end to it, and it formed the intellectual substance of a happy marriage. Apart from Nellie, Silas, and Henry, Arthur Cheed had nothing to think about but the fortunes of his business and the mysterious and much-advertised fermentation known as world-politics. On this particular October evening he was
in the act of gulping down a third cup of tea (a beverage to which he was much addicted) when his daily dose of international alarm was administered to him. It was followed by football results, but at that point, remembering that young Fred was not so sharp at the job as he might be, he switched off and hurried back to the shop.

Arthur Cheed had not consciously attended to the SOS concerning Roderick Strood. But the name had found safe lodgement in him somewhere, so that when he chanced upon it five days later, in his evening paper, the paragraph in question had more meaning for him than it had for Sidney H. Nywood.

“Look, Nellie. Listen to this. Here's the chap they were asking for on the wireless the other day.

“‘The inquest on Mrs Daphne Strood, who was found dead in her bed, was concluded today, when sensational allegations were made by Mildred Tucker, deceased's cook. On the direction of the Coroner, a verdict of wilful murder was returned against the husband, Roderick Strood, thirty-four, architect. …'”

MY DEAR BOY,—I have spent this morning in Venns Wood, wondering what I could say to you of all that is in my heart and mind. There are still some green leaves showing, in spite of the season, as though they did not know it was winter. You must bear with me if I ramble too much. I am still dazed from the shock of what you tell me, and cannot collect my thoughts, cannot quite bring myself to believe your dreadful news. You have kept yourself something like a stranger from me for so long, only an occasional visit and nothing said to the purpose, and it is difficult for me to understand how these things can have happened to you. God knows I am not reproaching you, but you must understand how it is with me. I think I am not so quick as I was. Perhaps I was never very quick, or I could have been a better father to you and things would never have come to this. But
it is idle to be thinking of that now, when your need is so great. Your faith lost, your marriage dishonoured, those are not small things, but they are small indeed, they are trifles, compared with the cruel blunder that has put you where you are now. And dear Daphne gone—I cannot realize it yet. I dare not begin to grieve for you, for once I began there would be no end to it.

I thank God, and I thank you, that you did not let me hear all this from strangers, from the newspapers. You say the hardest part of your burden was the having to tell me, and you wonder, you say, what I must think of you and whether I can forgive you. Perhaps that last, my dear, was not quite sincere in you. I hope it was not, for it would hurt me very much if I believed you doubted my love at such a time. You wish you could have spared me. You must not wish that. It would have been a mistaken kindness had you tried to shield me from knowledge of your situation. Don't you see that I must be with you now and suffer with you? That is all there is left for me. Not with you in the flesh, for you say that would make your ordeal the harder to bear, and I am ready to believe it. Nevertheless I shall be with you, as God is with you. He is with you, whether you know him or not. Nothing can separate us from the love of God. I do not want to write to you in a language that is alien to your way of thinking, but I cannot be silent on a matter that so deeply concerns you. For nearly fifty years I have preached a simple gospel to simple people. It has served their needs, and I have never thought it necessary to correct the crude pictures they have in their minds. Pictures of some sort they must have. If poor Maggie Boyle chooses to picture Almighty God as a sentimental busybody, someone rather like her own Vicar with omnipotence added, I shall only muddle her by trying to put her right. You remember Mrs Boyle, Roddy—she's the young woman, not so young now, who got herself provided with three children, and only consented to come to church with their father in time for the fourth to be born in wedlock. A good soul, in spite of her eccentricities.

But I'm running on, and away from the point. The other day I was reading about what they call the New Physics. I know little enough of the subject, but the writer made one
point that struck me as very suggestive. He said that in the last century it was the aim and practice of physicists to make mechanical models of the phenomena they observed, and that the events in their world, ‘the world of the infinitely little' was the phrase he used, were such as could be clearly pictured in the mind. But now, it seems, all that is changed. I expect this is familiar ground to you. The new world of the physicist, said this writer, is unimaginable, and cannot be described except in the language of mathematics. A foreign language to me, as you know. You'll say I am a long time getting to the point, but here it is. You think you've lost your belief in God, my dear child, because you can no longer take seriously the foolish pictures we Christians have made of him. God is not this and not that; every picture of him is a fiction and a falsification; in his essence he is beyond the utmost reach of thought. I say
he
and
him
for lack of alternative. I should be glad indeed, for your sake, to get away from that misleading, limiting, pictorial phraseology. There's a saying by a fourteenth-century mystical writer that I have never dared to quote to my congregation. Of God himself can no man think, he says. By love may he be gotten and holden, but by thought never. But forget the
he
and the
him,
Roddy. Forget the Creator and the Judge and all pictures whatsoever. I would almost dare to say—Forget, if it stands in your way, the picture of a Heavenly Father which Our Lord gave us. But of this be persuaded, as I am persuaded: that there is an eternal and living reality in whom we live and move and have our being, and whose being in some sense we share. This has been the central faith and fact of my long life. There is a light beyond our darkness and a purpose that makes music of our confusion—and we, you and I, have some part in both. Hold fast to that and fear nothing.

So here I am, preaching again, though preaching was not what I intended. I had a very kind letter from a Mr Perryman. It came with yours this morning, a very great kindness, the touch of a hand in the dark. He tells me you are to have the best possible help and advice, which is a great comfort. You were always a brave child and you will be brave now. For your own sake and mine you must not dwell overmuch on past sins and follies, nor waste your strength in wishing them
undone. You know, as I do, that you are innocent of the terrible crime they charge you with, and before long your innocence will be declared to the world. I am having the telephone installed, to be in touch with your friend Perryman. I think he is very fond of you, Roddy. Don't lose heart, my boy. Do you remember that day in the orchard when they brought us the news of your dear mother's accident? You were in your tenth year, I remember. Well, now we are together again, as we were then. Brothers, shall I say, as well as father and son. I am an old man, and in the nature of things it cannot be long before I am called away from this place. But I know God will not let me die till you are free again. I have you in my heart and in my prayers, and God has us both. For underneath are the everlasting arms.