A Pin to See the Peepshow

by F. Tennyson Jesse

  Marian came once, graceful, smart, delicately made-up, but she never came again. Ruby came once, but the Governor did not prove very amenable to the charms of Ruby. Anne came as often as she could, and so did Dr. Ackroyd; but the message of Gipsy, Anne and Dr. Ackroyd was the same—Don’t get depressed, Julia, it’ll be all right. How did they know, Julia thought!

  And yet, after the first five or six days, during which she lived as one half-conscious, she began to feel confident herself. Of course, everything would be all right. After all, although Leo had done this dreadful thing, although he had done the far worse thing of keeping her letters, she hadn’t had the slightest idea that he was going to meet her and Herbert in the Square that night, or that he was going to attack Herbert. Of course, everything would be all right.

  The solicitor came very often and went over every detail of the case with her. He suggested points of view that Julia had never known existed. He was kind, and believed she hadn’t known that Leo was coming to the Square that night. Yet he seemed anxious. Above all he was anxious that Julia should not do what he called “go into the box”—that meant the witness-box.

  “You can’t go and tell your own story yourself,” he said.

  “But why shouldn’t I?” asked Julia. “I can tell it better than anybody.”

  He looked at her for a moment or two in the little green-panelled room where he always saw her. They were always alone together, with an officer outside the glass doors, and they could talk freely.

  “Mrs. Starling,” he said, “you have never been subject to the ordeal of the box. You have no notion what it’s like. You are, I believe, a very successful business woman. You have always managed to—how can I express it?—to put it over. You won’t be able to in the box.”

  Julia could not believe him. She had always been able to make men believe what she said. Why should this be different, especially when she knew she was telling the truth?

  “But I shall be telling the truth,” she pointed out.

  “About that night in Saint Clement’s Square? I don’t doubt it—but how will you be able to explain about the letters? As a matter of fact Sir Oswald Pelham is most anxious that you should not go into the box.”

  Julia shut her mouth stubbornly. “Of course, I’ll go into the box.”

  “Sir Oswald may throw up his brief if you insist.”

  “Oh, all right,” said Julia, wearily, “there’ll be somebody else.”

  “My dear Mrs. Starling, it creates a very bad impression if one of the best-known counsel at the criminal bar throws up his brief. You can’t swop horses while crossing the stream.”

  “I’m going into the box,” said Julia stubbornly.

  Her solicitor, who knew Sir Oswald was not going to throw up his brief, because he believed—at the least—in his client’s technical innocence, made a little gesture of acquiescence. After that he confined himself to going over the various details of the case with Julia, trying to impress on her what she must say, and what she must not say.

  The prison life went on regularly, just like a clock. The chaplain, Mr. Davidson, a thin man, burned up with the love of his fellow humans, in a state of perpetual distress because he could do so little for them, visited her every morning; but Julia had very little to say to him. He found, not very much to his surprise, that she was completely without the elements of religion; that a child in any well-run Sunday school would have known more than she did. Neither the Bible nor the Sacraments meant anything to her, because she knew absolutely nothing about them. The medical officer—a Scotsman, Dr. Ogilvie—visited her every day, and to him she talked freely, because in her eyes a doctor was more of a man than a parson could be—especially an unmarried parson such as Dr. Davidson.

  The Lady Superintendent she liked because she had some of the qualities of Gipsy; a warmth, a genuine kindliness, which even the strict discipline she enforced could not hide. But after all, what good was a Lady Superintendent to Julia? The Governor was kind; but, felt Julia uneasily, he was somehow too clever; he understood her better than she wished to be understood. Just as she was beginning to tell him about herself, he would turn the conversation and say: “The Lady Superintendent is the best person to listen to all that.” Yet he was not the sort of man you would have expected to know about women. He was, in appearance, the ideal soldier that she had day-dreamed about in the war. Very tall, upright, thin and brown, with a little close-cropped moustache.

  Daily she exercised with the other women on remand, in a garden where there was a circular path of asphalt round a grass centre. There were some flowers growing in some beds and some glass-frame houses on one side, with little plants budding in them. There was a seat on which she could sit when she was tired.

  The other women looked at her, and she could feel something of awe and admiration in their gaze, and she would hold her head up, and for a moment feel Julia Starling again, the real Julia Starling, not this creature caught in a nightmare.

  At the far end of the exercise ground was a high wall, of the same dark, yellowish-grey brick as most of the prison, and beyond it she could see the roofs and chimneys of the houses where free people lived—only the other side of that wall. That very smoke that curled up out of the chimneys seemed to have a quality of freedom in its vagrant eddies.

  She had begun to get books from the library by now. Anything to help pass the long days, and she tried, listlessly, to play draughts and patience; but the days dragged dreadfully. There were the visits from Mum, and even from Uncle George, Aunt Mildred and Elsa, strained little visits, when she felt that they were ashamed of her; and yet were aware of a certain importance which she had bestowed on them. There were visits from the Governor and the doctor and the Lady Superintendent, and visits from her solicitor, whom she saw alone in a little green-panelled room.

  Sometimes it seemed to her that the day of the trial was approaching horribly quickly; sometimes it seemed to her that it would never come.

  iii

  Trial

  The day came at last, and Julia, under the prim, but not unkindly, eyes of the officer, made-up her face. Thank God she was allowed her own things, she thought; if the light at the Old Bailey was anything like the light at the police court, she’d need all the help she could get. She adjusted her little black hat carefully, swung the blue-grey cape round her shoulders, picked up her bag, and was ready. Down the stone stairs, people peering at her from the closed doors of the wards. She was Julia Starling, everyone knew about her, she was a figure of importance. This time she had a real car—you wouldn’t have known it from a private one, and it added to her feeling that soon she would be free again. It would be terrible, this ordeal she had to go through, but soon she would be free. She heard the screaming of the trams. She thought: soon I’ll be riding on a tram again, on the top of the tram, sitting in front as though I were in the prow of a ship; and as she thought of a ship, she thought of Leo, who had brought her to this pass.

  It was because of Leo she was riding to the Old Bailey. It was right that Leo should be punished for what he had done to her, as well as for what he had done to Herbert. But then she thought, with a sudden ache, of his curly head that she had held to her bosom, and of his long, deep kisses. She didn’t love him now. How could she love anyone who had done to her what he had done?

  What she had called love, that high, romantic thing she had lived for, now seemed unreal; it no longer existed. More than that, it never had existed. For this hideousness in which she was now caught was reality. Beside this, nothing was real. These walls, these floors, these people, this dread … this whole nightmare was real as she had never known reality till now.

  At night in that dreadful ward, with its perpetual vigilance, even when she slept, neither dreaming mind nor reminiscent pulses wanted Leo any longer, though in sleep one was defenceless, at the mercy of mind and body. In the daylight, with reality driving her into the corner of
each moment, there was no place for Leo.

  The car stopped and she got out, this time with her head held high. She was here to fight, and she was going to fight. She was no longer going to be the dazed human being who had lived through these terrible weeks since Herbert had died.

  Julia was dimly aware of grey walls going up into the grey air round about her, and a door through which she was hustled. She was so determined on still being herself, still being Julia Starling, that she hardly noticed the things around her.

  There was a long counter to her left, and a man in uniform sat behind it. She did wonder for a moment, as she was checked in, whether Leo was there already or not; she was too intent on holding on to herself to think of much else. She was taken through a door made of iron bars—again that dreadful locking and unlocking—and down a flight of stone steps, and she wondered vaguely why it seemed to her that she was in the Tube. Then she realised that it was exactly like the Tube. There was the same artificial air, full of artificial ozone, the same shining washable tiles on the walls, the same long echoing corridors. Brown shiny tiles below, white shiny tiles above. Dry, cold Tube air—what wouldn’t she give for it to be all true? To be going up to one of the wholesale places in the City, her cloak blown about her by those strange blasts that met you at the corners of the passages.

  “In here, please,” said the constable, briskly, and she was taken into a little room, one of a row all exactly alike, on her right. It was very like the cell in the police station, but a bit larger, and it had one chair, a little table, but no water-closet; and the square cut in the door was filled in with glass.

  She sat down, her heart beginning to beat thickly and heavily, in spite of herself. Everything had begun by now to seem very much the same to her—police court, prison, and now the Old Bailey; turnings of keys, brown and white walls, perpetual spy-holes, long corridors, jolting, uncomfortable drives, checkings in—all the rest of the paraphernalia of this strange life, which apparently had existed always for so many people, but of which she had never thought.

  As she had been taken to her cell she had passed one or two with strange, anxious faces pressed against the glass in the doors; faces whose chief characteristic seemed to be a corrugated brow; faces that looked like something at the Zoo, and now here she was herself, like something in the Zoo, but at least she wouldn’t go and press her face against the pane of glass. She even welcomed this time spent in the little cell, because at last she was alone. The officer, Miss Bendon, who by now seemed almost a friend, was waiting outside in the corridor.

  For the first ten minutes Julia sat on the one little chair, her eyes closed, thankful to be alone. Miss Bendon wasn’t even looking in. Once or twice Julia glanced up and saw the back of her neatly-trimmed head, the straight line of her averted cheek, tinged with a smooth russet. It was decent of her not to be staring in.

  Then, after the first ten minutes, panic suddenly seized Julia. The four walls, already so close together, seemed to draw nearer, and press round about her. Even standing on the chair she couldn’t look out of the little high window. She ran to the door and pressed her face to the pane of glass; and then feeling that she too must be looking like something from the Zoo, wrinkled and anxious, she drew back, and forced herself to sit on the chair again, and went on waiting, her throat dry and constricted. Once or twice Miss Bendon glanced in at her and looked away again. Then the door was unlocked, and there were two police officers besides Miss Bendon. Julia was being told to go along, and there in front of her as she turned to go along the passage was Leo. She couldn’t mistake the back of his dark, curly head, the set of his shoulders, even with her short sight; she knew them too well. He turned to go up a flight of stairs, and she saw he was holding his head up, and she remembered that she too must hold hers high.

  She began to follow him up the stairs, that curved into a sort of pen. Coming into the pen was like coming up to the surface after being in a mine, for the bright white light seemed to fill it like a sudden tide of clear water after a dark night.

  It was a big pen, this. Everything here, as it had been below, was brown and white, save for the green leather of the seats and backs of chairs; but it was a different brown and white, all suggestion of the Tube had vanished. Here everything was light-brown polished oak, pens, benches, boxes, and even the panelling of the walls—and white curves went up to meet the white glass roof. Light, light, light—cruel and cold. Light in which one drowned. Light that welled upon one like water, and in which the countless creatures’ eyes stared, apparently magnified, like the eyes of fishes in an aquarium. Everywhere there were eyes; eyes looking down at her from a gallery high up on the right, looking at her from serried ranks of seats, boring into the small of her back from rows of seats behind; looking up at her from the solicitors’ table below, looking at her from the angle of the jury-box, looking at her from everywhere. Before her, a blot of scarlet told her of the presence of the lord of life and death. By screwing up her eyes she could see the grey fuzz that his wig made above his reddish clean-shaven face.

  Julia felt something arise within her to meet this battery. She held her head up. She didn’t look at Leo, except with that first glance, which had given her a curious choking sensation. For that glance had revealed to her that they were strangers, such strangers that it was an indecency that they who had been together in a bed should be together in this pen. Together in their trouble, they yet seemed to look at each other across a vast desert of amazement. His eyes said to her the same thing that hers said to him. How has it happened that we’re here? It wasn’t worth it. It was none of it real.

  That was true, thought Julia, it was none of it real. This couldn’t be real. It was just something she must get through as best she might, and then the whole hideous nightmare would be over.

  Vaguely, not only because of her short-sighted eyes, but because of the mist in her mind, Julia heard a little man gabbling something to the jury, and the jury, also gabbling something in turn, answered. The jury … it was with them that her fate lay. She screwed up her eyes and studied them. Two women and ten men … they looked the sort of people she was used to dealing with in her life behind the scenes at l’Etrangère. The foreman was just such a one as Mr. Coppinger; the women might have been a couple of Mrs. Santleys. The rest of the men looked like buyers or travellers. She noticed that her hands were trembling oddly, and Miss Bendon passed her a glass of water. She took a few sips with difficulty. There seemed to be an iron bar across her throat which prevented her swallowing. She held her hands firmly clasped together in her lap.

  Her counsel was saying something about an objection and the judge said the jury would retire. The jury did retire, with a scraping and shuffling of feet.

  More people were talking now, arguing about letters, her letters to Leo. There was her counsel, arguing, as far as she could follow, that the letters were not what he called admissible.

  The judge seemed to be arguing that they could prove there was a conspiracy—Oh, thought Julia, desperately, I’ve got a good business brain, I know I have. Why can’t I follow this?

  But fear had invaded her, invaded all her brain and all her body, and she was almost numbed with it. Instead of being alert, following every argument, she sat like a woman in a dream. Anyway, what was all this about accessories before the fact and principals in the second degree? Her solicitor had tried to explain it to her at the prison, but she had not understood much of it then.

  The man who was against her, the man who was for what they called the Crown, was arguing also about principals in the second degree, and about something called incitement. She hardly followed the remarks of the judge, except that he used the word “admissible” again. So she supposed that the letters, her precious, private letters, that Leo had kept in spite of their agreement, were going to be read in this dreadful place.

  The jury shuffled back with the same scraping of feet, and again the man who was against her sto
od up to talk. Funny, thought Julia, staring at him, holding her hands tightly together in her lap, he didn’t look like a man at all. He seemed something quite impersonal, and yet, under those robes, he must have all the funny clothes men wore, and in which they looked so undignified; braces and pants, and socks and a vest, and a shirt, all the funny clothes that seemed to a woman’s eye to be cut up into all the wrong proportions.

  She had thought that before at St. Michael and All Angels, when she had gone with Miss Tracey to what Miss Tracey called “High Mass.” There was the priest at the altar, stiff in brocade and gold, and as his head bowed low, she had seen the ends of his trousers below his cassock and alb, and suddenly had a vision of him with those funny clothes men wore. Now the barristers and judge were the same. It was as though they had to dress themselves up to look anything at all. Why, if all the clothes in that court were suddenly whipped away by the hand of a fiery angel, and everyone found himself or herself naked, the trial would come to an end. People with hair on their chests, and all the funny little incidents of the human body displayed all over them, couldn’t have conducted a trial; and yet that was what they all were—just tiny little people with hair in odd places, and toe-nails that needed cutting, and tiny, bewildered hurt souls inside of all of them. They only got on with their business at all, or with any business, by dressing it all up.

  And this wasn’t her life that the man who was against her was describing. It couldn’t be. She and Herbert had never been happy together. Leo hadn’t broken into a happy marriage in the way this man was saying. She had been profoundly unhappy all the time, and she and Leo had just known when they met each other that they could have been happy if only they had been together. How ordinary this man made her life sound, ordinary and yet dreadful. Why, he was even quoting the letter she had written to Leo after they had had tea together—that time when it had first occurred to her it would be marvellous and splendid to be one of the great lovers of the world. Another letter, the one in which she had said that she was having to give Herbert the “love” which she could only bear to give Leo. … Well, that had been true. That didn’t prove you wanted to murder anyone. She had given it to Herbert, anyway, or at least Herbert had thought so—although in her own mind she had known that she was really enjoying Leo.