The contrast so frequently drawn between the country inn and the London gin palace is the product of ignorance. Most of the London pubs are as much “locals” as any rural beerhouse. Mr. Stannard knew three-quarters of his clients every night, and knew, too, most of their sorrows and failings. The rough side of his tongue was kept exclusively for strange patrons who had taken too much drink. His normal gentleness wholly disappeared and he would snap: “No more for you, sir! And be so good as to leave this house immediately.” His white moustache seemed to bristle and Fred, his son-in-law and chucker-out, would sidle near. Generally, assistance was not required; Mr. Stannard’s eye sufficed, supported by public opinion:
“That’s ri’.”
“I’d go off home, chum; I would.”
“Had enough, I reckon.”
His manner to friends who wished to exceed was quite different. He would fail to hear the order for a long time, and when it became impossible to continue, would fold his arms on the bar and lean over and conduct a slow conversation, consisting chiefly of the following sentences, arranged and rearranged in various orders:
“Now, do you really want to drink any more?
“I’d have said you had rather a good deal, Bert.
“You know I have to think of my licence. I’ve been worried a great deal recently.
“Excuse me while I attend to that gentleman in the Private.
“You gentlemen, you tell me: Do you really think Bert wants any more?
“Now you see, Bert, I don’t feel I really could serve you after that.”
Or alternatively, if the appeal to the audience was not answered rightly:
“I’m most surprised at you encouraging him. I’m not sure that I’m wise to serve any of you.” A threat which generally produced a sudden silence and an exhortation to Bert to give over.
It was thirty years since his wife had died and his main interest was the life of the pub. Old friends came to see him every night: they told him of births, deaths, marriages, and trouble with the police or landlord. They waited for him to seal the subject with: “Well, that’s very nice; I’m sure they’ll be very happy,” or “Troubles never come singly.” Each time the remark seemed charged with renewed meaning and importance. Life for him was a blurred series of warm golden evenings, blue fog of tobacco smoke, the sharp and sweet heavy smell of beer, the dart board full in his view, the steady roar of conversation. No day was separated from another in his memory. He took no holiday. For a week in August he sent away his daughter Gwen, the barmaid, and her husband to Margate, and with a considerable effort looked after the pub singlehanded. His one worry was the law, which is complicated enough for publicans, and was made worse for him by a nervousness dating from a trivial conviction for poaching in his extreme youth. On the only occasion when his licence was challenged he exhibited every sign of guilt. He turned alternately red and white, and stammered and could not answer the simplest question. He might very well have lost his licence if the police inspector in attendance had not intervened and effectively taken the conduct of the case away from him. He had declared that the Hanging Gate was, in the police opinion, the best conducted public-house in the district, and Mr. Stannard a most conscientious and careful licensee. He very nearly accused the Vicar of St. Barnabas’, in so many words, of evil-speaking and bearing false witness. (He saw himself a Baptist and the vicar was High Church.)
When Mr. Stannard received his juror’s notice he was deeply distressed. A quite unreasoning terror overcame him and he remained seated in his corner in silent dejection for three nights on end. His digestion went entirely wrong; he drank nothing but weak gin and peppermint, and he refused all conversation. One evening he left the bar wholly to Fred and Gwen, and sat alone in the little back sitting-room over the fire, brooding. Policemen and law-courts: they meant no good and he was sure to make a fool of himself. He stared sullenly at the horsehair sofa and framed photograph of his wife above it, and gradually memories came back into his mind and soothed him. Dolly had died just before the war. End of 1913. Two months after his son Jim had gone to Australia, and Gwen only a little girl. He thought of his son, whom he had never seen since. A good boy, and doing well. Jim had three sons, whose photographs, with his daughter-in-law’s, were on his mantelpiece. Each year Jim wrote to him on his birthday, and every Christmas he wrote back, short, difficult letters, with each letter slowly outlined in deep-pressed pencil, and ending “your affect father, J. Stannard.” There was rarely anything in them but news of the family’s health and the state of trade. World history was, as it were, seen through the bottom of a beermug. 1916 received this description:
“It is getting more difficult to obtain good beer and twice recently I have run out of stout. Understand that owing to things in General we may be really short and have to refuse custom.”
1917 was the year in which “I hardly See any of our old Regulars, and some will not be coming Back, am sorry to hear. The Place is full of women drinking as much as men, and would drink anything, but it’s not what you like but what you can get, the prices you would not Believe.”
1918: “The War being over every one was very merry and Drank Plenty, or would have: I was compelled to Open at eleven and soon was drunk out, and I believe every House round here the same.”
Just about forty years he’d been in the house, he reflected. And a quarter of a century now without Dolly. Her memory was even a little dim; his thoughts slipped back to his childhood and young manhood in Suffolk, which for some reason stood out with greater clarity. Tall hedges and deeply rutted lanes. Walberswick Church, which to his memory was a gigantic ruin, a cathedral, in which one corner still standing was roofed over and used as a church by the few remaining worshippers. And especially horses: the horses belonging to the great house, where he was employed. No motor-cars then. He tried to fix his mind on the roads as they were then. Piles of horse dung. No motor-cars; no noise except a clip-clop and a jingle. What were the surfaces of the main roads like? He found he could not remember. But he could remember the sharp and delightful stink of horse and the smell of leather.
For Dr. Holmes, also, the present pleasures were those of memory. Left alone by his rare gossips he would sit in the teashop or his untidy rooms, his pale eyes glazed over, looking back at his life.
Son of a Victorian clergyman with the expected full quiver, he had gone to Magdalen on scholarships, taken a brilliant first in Greats, and then a Fellowship at another college. His father to the end of his life believed Percival to be the success of the family. But Dr. Holmes knew better. He loved Greek, and was, he believed, next to Wilamowitz Möllendorf, the best living textual critic. He had kept his hands free from any of the vulgar popularizations such as those of the Regius Professor, Gilbert Murray. Indeed he had scored some severe hits on that school. He remembered with glee, the time when he had told the professor that his last edition of Euripides deserved a place in the Catena Classicorum. Ha! That had been a bitter one. But deserved. If the Classical Review had dared to print his review, one reputation would have been finally ended. But what was the good of defending old style scholarship when Greek was nearly a forgotten language? He was like an alchemist or an astrologer, vainly offering instruction in sciences in which no one believed. He was lucky to receive only oblivion and not direct insult. Nox est perpetua una dormienda, but it was a little hard to be relegated to sleeping your perpetual night even before your death.
Worse still, his memory seemed to be failing. Adrian, Frederick, Lionel, Alistair…where were they, and which was which? There had never been any scandal, for nothing scandalous had ever occurred. They were all golden or dark boys, whom he had loved passionately, and who had elegantly supported his uncouth and obvious affection. For three years; and then, always, they had gone. Now their figures seemed to run into each other. He remembered walking tours, reading parties, holidays in Switzerland undertaken with his pupils; he saw himself clumsily clamber
ing around rocks and suffering from sore feet, hating exercise but willing to suffer far worse than that to be allowed to go about with his favourite. He had controlled himself strictly, for he knew that he was far from attractive, and the university was old and well-informed. A little speculation about the Sacred Band of Thebes sometimes; sometimes to touch and at a great risk to kiss a hand; once or twice to say: “Do you know you’re very handsome?” And by then it was generally too clear that he could go no further; and at the end of their third year they went away and forgot him.
Where were they now? Adrian, Maurice, Alistair, Lionel…some of them were dead. Handsome and young and dead…eumorphoi…the enemy land has hidden its conquerors. The thought of the war turned him suddenly away from Aeschylus to a memory which had not dimmed. There had been, after all, one who had not been indifferent to his shambling tutor. He had been allowed to call him Dion. Tears were fated for Hecuba and the Trojan women as soon as they were born, but for you, Dion, when you had crowned your success the gods poured out the finest hopes upon the ground; and you have an honoured grave on the wide plains of your country. 0 Dion who sent my heart mad with love. “O emon ecmēnas thumon erōti, Dion:” he whispered the line to himself again—the slightly too-long dark curly hair and the bright brown eyes were before him again, and the strong hand ruffled his own lanky strands. His Dion had enlisted in 1914 in the R.F.C. and had come back within a week broken. He lived three days in hospital, unconscious: he was buried in the cemetery of the Wiltshire village where he was born. On the wide plains of his country.
The only thing worth remembering in his life and that was twenty-five years ago.
Dr. Holmes stood up dignifiedly in court despite his absurd shape. The clerk had vexed him slightly by calling out the wrong name but he repeated the oath in a loud firm voice: “I swear by Almighty God that I will well and truly try, and true deliverance make between our Sovereign Lord the King and the prisoner at the bar whom I shall have in charge, and a true verdict give according to the evidence.”
Mr. Stannard, who had leapt up when his name had been called and sat down again scarlet with shame, repeated the oath next, stammering slightly and far from clearly.
4
The Clerk of Assize, his mind now firmly fixed on his duties, handed the Bible to the next juror and said: “Edward Bryan, repeat after me…”
***
Here is a portrait of Edward Bryan, fourth juror.
At fifty-five he was a tall and melancholy-looking man, clean-shaven, with a narrow face, dark eyes and hair. He had a slight but perpetual twitch in the left eye which did not worry him because he was not aware of it. He was unmarried and occupied the post of cashier in an important branch of a large multiple grocery firm. He had occupied that post seventeen years and expected to continue to occupy it until he died or retired. Before he had been cashier he had been assistant cashier, before that he had served behind the counter, and before that he had been an errand boy, all for the same branch of the same firm. He had gone there immediately after leaving Board school and he had never attempted to go elsewhere. His mother had said to him: “Be respectful and hardworking, Edward; do your duty by Messrs. Allen and you’ll never regret it.” So he had done; not because of what his mother had said, for he had broken with her long before her death, but because it was in his nature. He was not unusually efficient, but he was industrious and silent: he had arrived at his present post chiefly by virtue of seniority.
He was neither liked nor disliked at his work; he was accepted almost as part of the furniture, he had been there so long. One of the girls in Cheese and Butter said that once when he was working late in his usual dark-grey suit a charwoman had dusted him without either of them noticing it. He never spoke to any of his fellow-workers, except in the way of business, when he addressed them with formal civility. He had no interest in sport, in women, in politics, in the condition of trade, or even in the conditions of work in the Southeastern Head Branch of Messrs. Allens. If attempts were made to open a conversation with him on any of these subjects, he repelled them by the use of a reply which had three forms, varying with the grade of the speaker:
(1) “I take no interest in such things. I would advise you to get on with your work.”
(2) “I’m sorry, but the subject doesn’t interest me.”
(3) “I’m sorry, sir, but I know nothing about the subject. My interests have never lain in that direction.”
So far as his colleagues knew, he had always “been that way”. They left him alone after a while; he did no one any harm. Nor did they ever find out in which direction his interests did lie.
He had been that way for twenty-seven years: it was when he was twenty-eight that he settled into the way of life and thought which he never afterwards changed. Up till then he had been only a silent and rather clumsy young man, oppressed by the number of his family (he was one of nine children) and his obligation to help in supporting them.
He knew he was deficient in ambition and second-rate in intelligence. It cost him great efforts to perform his work adequately, and he was continually tired. He saw no hope of ever contributing much to help his family, and he did not very much like his family. He was not so much miserable as discouraged; at so early an age he saw no meaning in life and felt as though he was weighted with burdens that were too heavy for him to carry and in which he had no interest. He did not like drinking and he did not like smoking; there was no relief for him there. Other relaxations he did not try. Indeed, the only signs of energy that he ever showed were sudden fits of rage in which he drew his lips back from his teeth and grinned like a dog. His family were frightened of him, not that he ever struck them but because his appearance was so ferocious. Moreover, he would break things—cups, a plate, or even the leg of a chair. Nor did he apologize after his fits; he merely ceased to rage.
These fits had also stopped at the age of twenty-eight, though that was of little help to his family, for he broke off all relations with them at the same time. After a certain day, when he left home, he never spoke to any of them again. When he received letters from them he read them carefully through, as though looking for something, tore them up and did not answer then. By now they had given up writing to him and he did not remember them very well; indeed, all his life before he had been twenty-eight was now half forgotten by him.
The change had come in him very suddenly, on a Sunday evening in March. He had on his bedroom wall one text which he had chosen because it seemed to him to promise relief from the burden which life was to him. It was from St. Matthew: Chapter II, Verse 28:
Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden and I will give you rest.
It seemed to him certain that if only he could interpret this aright he would find freedom from his load. But he had never been able to make it mean anything exact and certain; and the clergymen to whom he had listened had been useless. They had “offered only words”, as he phrased it, for he thought in clichés. They had told him to be unselfish, to help others, and to be meek—in other words to go on in the same wretched dreary way that he was travelling. These were only words indeed, and words which were as obviously empty as that text was full of meaning, if he could only understand it.
Now, on that evening he was reading the First Epistle of St. Peter, and ever afterwards had a special affection for that small document, as one might have for an unimportant man who had put one in the way of an immensely profitable bit of business. The phrase which caught his attention and suddenly seemed to glow with meaning was not even a full sentence. It was from the tenth verse of the second chapter and ran:
—which in time past were no people, but now are the people of God.
Who were these people? he asked himself. Then suddenly, almost with a click, he understood everything. His breath stopped, and then he gasped heavily, while his Bible slipped to the floor. He thought of falling on his knees, but could not wait to do so. This
must be confirmed—confirmed at once, and he picked up the Bible and began to turn its pages again with frantic haste.
It was like finding the key word to a cross-word puzzle, the one which makes every other word suddenly plain. But Edward Bryan never saw his revelation as anything so mundane as a cross-word puzzle. To him it invariably appeared as a narrow doorway streaming with light. All around him was darkness, in which there moved vaguely and uselessly, lumpish and unimportant, the things of this world. He could not see them clearly, nor did he wish to. Some ten feet away from him was a high and narrow slit, as from a door very slightly open, and through it was pouring a light so brilliant that nothing could be seen of what was beyond it. It was light and nothing else: it shone towards him not with a still radiance but with a sort of wave-like motion as if it were alive, and its goodness and warmth were ceaselessly being offered to him while he stood looking towards it. Some day, at an appointed time whose exact date did not matter to him, he would pass through that door; meantime when he lay awake in his bed he often would shut his eyes and peacefully watch that shining opening and let the beams beat restfully upon him.
It would have been surprising that others had not seen that light, if it had not been, as Scripture said, that they were literally blind. The truth was written out so patiently, so clearly, so much in words of one syllable that only blindness could explain their failure to see it. (And of course for blindness there was no cure: Edward Bryan was free of any need to proselytize.) The first text that he came to in his hurried search had been from St. Luke’s parable of Dives and Lazarus:
And beside all this, between us and you there is a great gulf fixed, that they that would pass from hence to you may not be able, and that none may cross from over thence to us.
Verdict of Twelve Page 5