The Jury (37 page)

When the murmur of approval had subsided, a new voice spoke. “I don't think you're necessarily right there,” said Oliver Brackett.

His neighbour, Major Forth, turned on him fiercely. “You mean to say you believe that nonsense?”

“I didn't say that,” answered Oliver cautiously. “I say it's not necessarily nonsense.”

“You admit it's an unlikely tale?” suggested Charles.

“Yes,” said Oliver, “it
is
an unlikely tale. And, now I come to think of it, that makes it all the more believable.”

The Major shrugged his shoulders in despair. “I don't follow your logic.”

“What I mean is this,” said Oliver. “If a man's making up a tale, and his life depends on its being believed, he takes pretty good care to see that it's a likely tale. Strood's no
fool: we're all agreed about that. Why should he pitch us such an improbable yarn? What's he got to gain by it?”

“Surely,” said Charles Underhay, “he wanted us to believe that he was on good terms with his wife, and that he wasn't playing her false by going off with his mistress.”

“I don't see why,” said Oliver. “He's on trial for murder, not for being a bad husband. He knows that as well as we do. His only hope of escaping the gallows is to convince us he's speaking the truth. Now I could invent half a dozen likelier tales than the one he told. So why did he hit on that one? Because it happened to be the truth. There's no other conceivable reason.”

“It's the truth,” sneered Gaskin, “because it's unlikely?”

“You've got it.”

“Something in that,” muttered Cheed. “I see what you mean.”

“Well, for my part,” said Gaskin, “that tale's not merely unlikely. It's impossible.” He tried to picture his own Agnes encouraging him to run off to Brighton with, say, little sister Stella. The idea filled him with excitement and despair. He swallowed convulsively and declared: “It's against human nature!”

“I
know
you're wrong there,” said Oliver, with a slightly embarrassed smile.

“Really,” exclaimed Clare impatiently, “how
can
you know?”

“Well, I do know: that's all,” said Oliver. “I know from my own experience.”

IT had happened just after the war, when Oliver was thirty-three. And it would perhaps never have happened but for Molly's long, tiresome, undangerous illness, and the fortnight in Cornwall which she spent, convalescent, with her mother. For her maiden home was in Cornwall: Oliver had found her there, a simple comely young woman, and, on the eve of his going to France as a soldier, had married her. It
had seemed the obvious, the only thing to do. The war over, he found himself the husband of a wife and the father of a three-year-old boy; and, though he could not pretend to be surprised at his situation, it was vaguely disconcerting at a time when, newly released from the mechanical thraldom of the army, he felt in the mood to begin his own life in his own way, making an entirely new start. But the lines were already laid down for him and he must follow them willy-nilly. A disappointing prospect, and he couldn't resist glancing wistfully at what might have been. He was fond of Molly and the child, but sometimes, in unguarded moments, he wanted adventure: not the kind of adventure, so called and so absurdly miscalled, that military service had offered, for there was no pleasure in being part of a blundering machine with every minute of one's life ordered, but the adventure of following, after four years of frustration, one's own bent, particularly (for such is the nature of man) one's own amorous bent. Particularly but not solely. Brackett senior, having shouted himself nearly hoarse during his forty years of auctioneering, was more than glad to take Oliver into the firm; and Oliver, having no practical alternative in mind (for the footlights were of fairyland), was constrained to agree. He settled down, and his father, when the time came, died happy in the knowledge that the voice of a Brackett, when his own was silenced, would continue to call for bids in the auction-rooms of East Farringay.

If Molly had enjoyed better health, if Molly hadn't had a mother in Cornwall to whom she could go for a change from the January bleakness of London, if Molly hadn't sent him to buy wool, and if an electric spark had not flashed from the warm brown eyes of the shop-girl to his own, Oliver would not have found himself gazing thoughtfully at the sea one cold clear evening in 1920. It was a night of many stars, and the moon was on the water. The amplitude and the intimacy of sea and sky made a perfect setting for what promised to be, in its way, a perfect experience. He felt as though he were living beyond time and space, in a moment that had no beginning and could have no end. He felt, in fact, as though he were living in a sentimental song. Deliberately he had put out of mind the extravagance, the danger, the dubious
ethics of this adventure; had forgotten the hotel, the furtively-purchased and somewhat ill-fitting wedding-ring, the scheming and the secrecy; and he contrived, by an act of will, abetted by imagination, to think of nothing but the beauty in which he was now enclosed. Standing on the balcony of this too-expensive hotel, with the star-tingling sky above him and the lithe sea shimmering below, he almost forgot the bedroom at his back and the joy that awaited him there; and at this moment, to add the last impossible touch of perfection, he suddenly caught sight of the winking lanterns of three fishing-smacks on the far horizon.

Mingling with his rapture, however, was a sub-mood of ironical self-protective humour. This is quite a Nefarious Enterprise, he thought. I've taken to lying, and I'm leading a young girl astray, or she's leading me astray. Bit of both perhaps: which is as it should be. But a child like her, she knows nothing of life. I'm twelve years older than she is. Am I a blackguard? Taking his cue from that word, he began to see himself as something rather sinister, the Cynical Seducer, the prowling Lothario. It's a shame; I can't do it; I'll have to send her home before it's too late. Too late, too late—ominous phrase. For a moment he was the anxious father, horsewhip in hand, confronting the ravisher of his daughter. You cur, you cad! Speak, child, speak! Am I indeed already too late? It is your old father who asks. All the same, said Oliver self-reprovingly, I
ought
to send her home; and true to his prevailing histrionic passion he dramatized the scene in which he explained to her that for her own sake she must forget him and go back to her mother's care. (No, that wouldn't do: her mother had been dead three years.) Then a few tears, a gentle kiss of parting, and … and what? Nothing would then remain but a very awkward interview with the manageress of the hotel, a taxi-ride to the station, a midnight journey, and an ignominious arrival at a London terminus in the small hours of a desolate morning. It's too late to retreat now, he said, and his heart leaped with happiness.

Stepping through the french windows into the bedroom, he perceived, shyly, that Jane was already in bed. The bedside reading-lamp shed a soft pink glow on her pillowed face. Himself and his histrionics forgotten, he stood at the bedside,
looking down at her. A slight frown puckered his forehead. “Are you quite sure, Jane?” Touched by her childish appearance, he was in the mood for renunciation: the idea positively allured him.

She smiled reassuringly. “Of course.” Seeing him still dubious she added mischief to her smile. “You don't seriously imagine you're seducing me, do you? It's quite the other way round, I assure you.”

He laughed. “But you're so young,” he protested, “so ridiculously young. You've no experience of … of situations like this.”

She countered, with a celestial grin: “It's not fair to blame me for that, darling. Everyone has to begin some time.” He began kissing her, and between the kisses she remarked: “I doubt whether you're such a hardened sinner either.”

“You're an innocent child,” he said, “in spite of your impudence. I feel I ought to——”

She kissed him again. “I know. You feel you ought to save me from myself. Poor fun for me, that would be.” It seemed to him that he had never known such kisses as these. “If you start being chivalrous, darling, I shall make a scene, I warn you…, Isn't it time you undressed?” she asked lightly. “It's past eleven.” He gave her a grateful glance, and her eyes, friendly and untroubled, regarded him with sober pleasure. …

Sitting in the jury-room with eleven pairs of inquiring eyes turned towards him, he spared one glance for that blissful night. By moral canons which he hardly thought of questioning, he should have felt guilt and shame. But in fact he felt neither. That there was something shabby and mean in the preliminary secrecies had been apparent to him, but in the sequel, in the warm dark night of love and friendliness, he had found nothing but happiness, a happiness sharpened to pain by the glancing shadow of tomorrow's farewell. Morning found him neither ashamed nor defiant. He was grateful, not only to Jane, but to something less personal, some vaguely apprehended beauty of which she was a vital flower. He was proud and humble; contented and a little anxious; aware of being permanently the richer for what had happened; aware too, with a twinge of dismay, of having given a new hostage
to fortune. He was also, at this pre-breakfast hour, a little dispirited, and inclined to take refuge in ironic humour. In the cold morning light, and with an empty belly, it was easy to hold the balance between the sentimental and the practical; but he dimly foresaw that as the day mellowed the magic would begin to return, and that with the first feather of dusk his memory of Jane would quicken, made poignant by her absence, would quicken and stir and become a voice crying in the heart. Returning from his luxurious bath he talked to her with forced gaiety, but in his mind was the uneasy question: When shall we be together again like this? We'll manage it somehow, he answered himself. But he couldn't silence the other answers that crowded in on him. She's young and high-spirited: why should she hang about for me? She'll want marriage and children and I'm not in a position to give her either. The end's inevitable: she'll find someone else, someone who's free, and marry him and be happy. Well, it's only right that she should. I mustn't get too fond of her, that's all.

But he was already too fond of her.

It was rather of Molly, however, that he was thinking now, with the eyes of his fellow-jurors upon him. Molly came back looking much the better for her holiday. The sight of her gave him a shock of pleasure, and of surprise. It was a homecoming in a double sense, for he felt that with Molly's return he too had come home. To find himself so fond of Molly was disconcerting, for it did not, as by the laws of arithmetic it should have done, make the idea of Jane any the less alluring. He had parted from that young woman on the express understanding that they were not to meet again—except by chance and as mere nodding acquaintances—until another adventure like the first could be arranged. To be seen together in Farringay, or near it, was too dangerous: on this point they were heartily agreed. But after three days of loneliness Oliver had persuaded himself that such caution was unnecessary. They met, talked, and vainly desired, on five occasions during the last five days of Molly's absence; and after her return, though with less frequency and with a more elaborate stealth, they continued to meet. It was nervous work, like tight-rope walking, and the danger was not of a kind that Oliver found exhilarating. In moments when he yielded to his fear of being
found out he saw the situation as intolerable and himself as a cad. He thought at first that he hated deceiving Molly, but in the course of repeated self-examinations he discovered that what he hated was not the deception but the idea of its failure and Molly's inevitable pain. Could everlasting success have been guaranteed his conscience would have ceased to trouble him, for so long as Molly was happy all was well. But, as things inexorably were, he began to realize that his passion for Jane was in danger of being dissolved in nervous anxiety and irritation.

It was Molly herself who averted that danger, by remarking, at the end of the midday meal one Sunday, after her young son had escaped to his nursery: “She's a nice girl, Olly, your little friend Jane. I've asked her to tea this afternoon.”

Oliver blinked. “You've done
what?”

“She's coming to tea. We had quite a nice talk together.”

“Oh, you did, did you?” Profoundly embarrassed, he half-smiled at her, searching her face for the reproach he thought he must find there. “All the same, she can't come here.” The proposal shocked him.

“Why not, pray?”

And this was the woman he had thought simple! “Look here, Molly. How much do you know?”

“Quite enough,” said Molly, with a touch of grim humour. Husband and wife stared at each other appraisingly. “I must say, Olly, you might have been a bit cleverer about it.”

“Cleverer?” He was baffled, confused, put to shame. “What d'you mean, cleverer?”

“Everybody knows, it seems, except me,” said Molly. “And now
I
know. I've known since Wednesday. But you needn't look so miserable about it,” she added briskly. “No bones broken. I'd sooner you'd told me yourself than have kind friends tell me. But never mind. You'll know better next time.”

Oliver stared at his boots. “It's no use saying I'm sorry…” He broke off. “But
how
much do you know about this?” It was inconceivable, in view of her good temper, that she could know everything.

“She didn't keep anything back,” said Molly. “That's one thing I liked about her.”

Oliver shrugged his shoulders in bewilderment. “This beats everything.” He tried to puzzle it out. “What did you want to go and see her for? What was the idea?”

“I didn't much like it at first,” said Molly, musingly. “It's no good pretending I did. But when I'd had a look at her——”