Verdict of Twelve

by Raymond Postgate

  In the end the police gave it up. She still lived on Les’s money and in Les’s house, for the business went on. But she hardly cared whether she lived or not, and when the jury notice came, paid it very little attention. A bit sardonic, she thought, when she was finally chosen. The law did nothing to protect me, and now expects me to protect and punish others. It wants my time, it claims it as a debt, and it wouldn’t do anything to save Les. How shall I pay it everything it owes? But what does it matter? Do what it wants. Say the words that it wants.

  So in her turn she stood up in court, kissed the book, and said in a flat, clipped monotone:

  “I swear by Almighty God…”

  6

  Experienced Clerks of Assize have the equivalent of a pineal eye. They know if behind them a judge or high officer of the court moves or changes his expression. This Clerk suddenly becomes aware that Sir Isambard Burns, leading for the defence, had lifted his eyebrows. A cold fear that he might be “spoken to” overcame him. Till now he had indulged himself by administering the oath slowly and inspecting the juror. He had better brisk himself up. Supposing he was publicly told to hurry up! He gabbled the oath and pushed the remaining jurors through at twice the speed.

  “Edward Oliver George, repeat after me…”

  “Francis Arthur Horder Allen, repeat after me…”

  “David Elliston Smith, repeat after me…”

  “Ivor William Drake, repeat after me…”

  “Gilbert Parham Groves, repeat after me…”

  “Henry Wilson, repeat after me…”

  ***

  The six men so unceremoniously hustled through were for the most part of medium height and undistinguished appearance. “First Citizen, second Citizen, third Citizen…” At first sight an observer might have taken them for genuine Mr. Zeroes, typical specimens of suburban inhabitants, supplied to order by a celestial department store. Only a closer inspection showed a marked difference in age, and a closer knowledge would have shown an even greater difference in disposition.

  Edward Oliver George was the oldest. His face was tired; he looked and was over fifty. Inconspicuously dressed in a dark suit, he managed to wear his Sunday best as if it was his habit to go about in good clothes. His thoughts were far away from the Court, away even from the small house which contained his wife and three children, a credit to him (as he considered) on six pounds a week. His thoughts stayed wholly in his office. He had only been General Secretary of the National Union of Plasterers’ Labourers for two years, and even now was not sure that the heartbreaking disorder created by his predecessor had been wholly cleared up. When he came in there had been an overdraft at the bank and the records were in depressing confusion. Men were drawing benefit who were not entitled to it: more, one branch secretary had even drawn strike pay for seven dead members. The first thing to be done had been to get the Executive to enforce the rule book strictly. That had been no easy job, and he had made many enemies. At one branch meeting two of his critics had set on him and he had thought for a minute that his time was up. Plasterers’ labourers can be very tough. But the branch had rallied to him: he was an elderly man and till a year or so ago had worked on a job like all the rest of them, and they would not see him knocked about. The meeting ended in an overwhelming vote of confidence in his policy, and an abrased nose for one of his critics.

  Next it had been his task to persuade the Society to abandon its vendetta against other building trade workers and join up with the National Federation of Building Trade Operatives. This had been an easier task in reality, though it had seemed a greater. The enforcing of the rule book had already taken out of the hands of the members their power to start V.T. continual small strikes over “demarcation disputes.” With the disappearance of these the chief occasion of quarrels with other unions vanished. The motion to affiliate to the Federation had been carried on a poll by 16,401 to 5,003 votes, and the newly elected Executive had duly made application. And now, just at this moment, with an untried executive and an important job like this on hand, there must needs come this stupid piece of paper calling him away from his work! That very morning he had had a note on his desk from the collecting steward on Trollope & Colls’s new job saying there’d be trouble any minute. No one in the office except the girl and the new chairman of the executive, who could hardly write his own name. Mr. George received the instruction to repeat the oath with an undisguised scowl. To have to sit all day listening to stuff that didn’t concern him; and Heaven knows what would be done behind his back. He’d told the girl to hold back all letters: he’d have to work half the night because of this imposition. “…give according to the evidence.” He very nearly slammed the Bible down as he finished.

  “Francis Arthur Horder Allen.”

  The man who succeeded him was obviously much younger, though he looked more than his twenty-six years. Something in his dress and way of standing showed that he was but recently down from Oxford or Cambridge. Dr. Holmes turned and looked at him: a don is not deceived. If he had known anything of his precursor’s occupation and interests, Allen would have claimed that they two were the only representatives of the workers on the jury. Yet there can have been no other two men on the jury who would have understood each other less.

  Black hair, dark eyes, a thin and incessantly excited face, Francis Allen was the most restless and probably the happiest man on the jury, except perhaps Edward Bryan. Can there be any greater happiness than to be young, unworried by money troubles, filled with desire to reform the world, knowing that you know the way, and married recently to a young woman with whom you are in love? This is a portmanteau picture of Francis Allen, as he was when he stood up and took the oath. He had changed very quickly—he was only three years from the young examinee on the Classical Tripos who told his friends that the sole object of all education was to be able to read and understand Spinoza. He thought that young man a prig and a fool: he was certain that that phase was over and that his present metamorphosis was his last. He did not hold a Communist Party ticket: he was not quite sure why he had held back. But after Spinoza he had read Marx—a great deal of Marx, after Marx some of Lenin, and after Lenin a very little Stalin, for by then his appetite for this literature was sated. For his Socialism or Communism (he varied the word according to his company) was not economic in origin, but emotional: his real teachers were Auden, Isherwood, Lewis and Spender, and if he had not been afraid of being unfashionable they would have been Shelley and Swinburne, too. He had written poetry himself, but he had the good sense to see the verses were imitations of Auden and they remained unpublished, except for two poems which had appeared in the Left Review.

  He had been married six months; he called her Jenny, because they both agreed that Caroline Dorothy was intolerable. And for this year and many years to come his two loves were one love: her thoughts and hopes were his: as he lived and fought and sacrificed for the Cause, so he loved and fought and sacrificed for her. Speaking at meetings, patrolling the streets, chalking the pavements, picking quarrels with the Fascists, defying police tyranny (but never yet had he had a real fight), he always felt that she was with him, approving and supporting, as often she was in the flesh. Loving her, feeling her head on his shoulder, listening to her tired, contented breathing, he was not a warrior deserting the field, but a comrade seeking and giving strength, uniting himself more closely with his fellow warrior and doubling both their power.

  Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus

  Rumoresque senum severiorum

  Omnes unius aestimemus assis.

  “Let’s live and love, my Lesbia, and reckon at a penny all the mutterings of conservative old men.” He had taught her just enough Latin to follow Catallus’s love songs.

  Da mi basia mille, deinde centum

  Dein mille altera, dein secunda centum.

  “Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred, then another thousand, then a second hundred.” He would go
through the whole poem, aloud or under his breath: he knew no English words that would carry his meaning.

  This very morning he had been woken early by the sun coming in through uncurtained windows. The curtains were never drawn since he had read a sentence from John Wilkes’s story of his tour through Italy with Gertrude Corradini: “There were no curtains,” wrote the eighteenth century gallant, “a circumstance in so temperate a climate most agreeable to Mr. Wilkes, because every sense was feasted in the most exquisite degree, and the visual ray held sometimes in contemplation the two noblest objects of creation, the glory of the rising sun and the perfect form of naked beauty.” His visual ray had to be cheated, for Jenny complained at the bedclothes being pulled off. “Must you love me so coldly?” The gradual lightening of the room gave him a slower and more sure pleasure. At first all was grey and uncertain: gradually outlines became clear, and then colours followed them. Over across the room were his books. A big orange patch, part standing and part fallen, were Left Book selections—the later ones, unfortunately, unread. Then a white patch—pamphlets. A red group: that was Capital, whose title would soon be legible. A long shelf below, irregular and of all colours; that was full of his Latin and Greek books. Not until all these were brilliantly clear would he allow himself to look at the dark head beside his on the pillow. And only after he had watched that still head until his breath was faster and the muscles of his face had tightened, as a baby’s do when it is going to cry, would he allow his hand to touch the smooth skin next to him. And then, he knew, the figure would turn itself round, swing a white arm out from the bedclothes across his body, and, eyes still closed in sleep, put up a half-pouting mouth to be kissed.

  So this day he attended in court, strong not weak after love, with such memories in the background of his mind. In the foreground was an intense curiosity: shortly, he thought, there was to be played before him a drama to which he alone held the key. Capitalist society had manufactured a highly complex machine to protect itself, and he was to see its workings from the inside. He knew too little of the legal system; it would be good to know how it really worked. He might be going to see corruption and oppression, the crushing of an individual. Or he might merely be going to be shown a picture of the decay of bourgeois life, a miniature of the death of a once powerful society. He took the oath negligently, not paying any attention to the words, and settled down to watch.

  “David Elliston Smith.”

  Mr. Elliston Smith was as ordinary as a man can be without being a caricature. He could have been Mr. Strube’s Little Man if he had only been undersized instead of normal height. He wore a bowler and a small moustache; he did not carry an umbrella only because the weather was fine and likely to stay so. He considered that he had been called up for jury service in error, but there was nothing that he could do about it. He was only technically a householder; but he was technically, and that settled the matter. He was one of four young men who had clubbed together, for economy’s sake, to take one of the new houses on a building estate. It had three bedrooms and two sitting-rooms. The front room was turned into a bedroom and the back room—opening on the garden and with French windows—kept as a common room. So, everybody had a room of his own. A woman came in to do for them and get an evening meal; the resultant expense was less than each one taking digs, and they had a house of their own and no one to interfere with them. No spying landladies. Elliston Smith had originally had misty thoughts of wild freedom, of “orgies” with complaisant young women, and drunken revellers lying in heaps on the cushions. Nothing like that had occurred yet, though he had not abandoned hope. Their combined resources did not run to more than bottled beer, and the few girls he knew were impregnably respectable and not in the least mysterious and seductive.

  The building society had declined to accept four young men as mortgagees. Some one person had to be entered as owner, and Elliston Smith was chosen. He was assistant in a well-established hairdressers’, and his employers were prepared to give him a cautious reference. He was twenty-four years old, unmarried and unattached, not a teetotaller but abstemious, friendly towards his parents, who lived in Dalston, but independent of them, a Conservative but a member of the League of Nations Union (in arrears), a supporter of Mr. Winston Churchill and of the Arsenal, a cinema-goer and a disliker of Jews without being in any way vehement. He took the oath with considerable pleasure, being a reader of detective stories and expecting scenes of thrilling excitement. It did not occur to him that he might be going to be abominably bored.

  “Ivor William Drake.”

  Mr. Drake held the book gracefully, he was conscious that he was well posed, he rebuked himself for being conscious, and then rebuked himself for rebuking himself. After all, if a man was an actor he should be an actor. There was no sense in shuffling and clumping about the place when you could move with dignity, and with an awareness of the fact that a life might shortly depend upon your decision.

  All the same that was, he reflected, likely to be the trouble right through the case. Every pose of counsel, every trick of movement or expression of the defendant, would be to him nothing but a pose or a trick. He would estimate it just as he would have done in a theatre—good acting, bad acting, or passable. Confound it, could he never be sincere, nor even recognize sincerity? A half-humorous grimace of irritation, as good as any of Noel Coward’s, ran across his face.

  Mr. Ivor Drake (he dropped the William) was twenty-seven years old, and he had decided to be an actor at the age of nine, when a tipsy uncle had taken him to see Owen Nares. He still could see the scene: Mr. Nares had been acting à deux with a well-known actress whose name had vanished. Hooey? Iris Hoey? His mind settled on that like a fly and then flitted away. Never mind: Owen Nares had shouted at her and looked so handsome. He remembered her smile as she turned to leave. “Bully me again, dear,” she had said, and then the lights went suddenly out. Nowadays, he was inclined to believe that that music-hall turn had been a sort of prenatal influence, and a bad one. For now he looked back on it, he did not think Owen Nares had acted at all. He had stood about and been handsome; nothing more. And for years after he had decided to act, Mr. Drake had underacted. He had stood about and been as handsome as he could manage.

  At the Oxford University Dramatic Society he had imitated Gerald du Maurier till even the devotees protested. He could tap a cigarette and mumble exactly like their idol; he could sing a little light music rather huskily in a fair imitation of Mr. Coward; but he could do no more. When he came to London his father’s allowance kept him from starving, and the fact that he was in the fashion found him a few small parts.

  But he was earnest in his profession, and not a fool. Du Maurier was dead and his dazzling charm no longer spoiled a whole generation of young actors. Drake woke suddenly. Too suddenly, perhaps: he now overacted. He was always playing Elizabethan. He told his friends that acting was a science, not an art, though what he meant by that was not clear. He would spend an hour or more before a mirror studying his own face, posing in very odd postures, and watching his expression. He made notes with numbers attached, indicating the position of every movable feature—eyebrows, eyes, lips—on a geographical chart, with latitude and longitude marked as on a map. The line of his nose was 0° and his right ear W. and his left E. By this means he had acquired a large file of cards, on which were marked the best possible expressions for indicating every common emotion, in degrees of strength running from one to ten. They were his most treasured possessions: he had shown them to one or two friends but they had been ribald. Now he kept them locked in his desk, but he practised with them assiduously before every rehearsal.

  “Gilbert Parham Groves.”

  There was a curious similarity between these two jurors: even the Clerk of Assize delayed his hurry sufficiently for a quick darting look. Their suits seemed identical—well cut, single breasted, dark grey. They looked, and were the same age; their height was identical, and both moved with the smooth, easy
gait that every tailor associates with the well-dressed and well-bred young man. They both had ruddy faces, blue eyes, fairly clean-cut features, and no moustache.

  But the resemblance was only superficial. Mr. Drake was what he acted, Mr. Groves only wished to be. Money and Oxford had given Mr. Drake his carriage: Mr. Groves had learnt it by watching models. For Mr. Groves was one of a very unfortunate caste: he was a gentleman travelling salesman. He had escaped from vacuums, it is true, but all those rackets are much the same. You go from door to door, exaggerating grossly the merits of your goods, knowing that you are lying. You are fairly sure that your customers can’t afford what you offer and don’t need it. You must look prosperous and a gentleman, and yet be prepared to be insulted and have doors slammed in your face. Unless you are going to sink slowly and miserably down until you end in the Spike, you have got to cultivate the qualities which the noisy bounder who engages you shows most perfectly. You have to have a brass finish. You must have no shame, you must be insistent against every canon of good taste, you must bully at need, you must be literally untiring, and above all you must never stop talking once you have trapped a listener. You must in short have all the qualities of a dictator, except that you had better know nothing about politics.

  Mr. Groves had most of these qualifications, and what he had not he was being forced to acquire. Like most of his fellow workers, he was a child of lower middle-class parents who had found that the industrial organization that had provided reasonably well for his father had no room for him and tens of thousands like him. His father and mother had sent him to a private school instead of a secondary school. State schools, they considered, were for the common people; at St. Desmond’s College the tone was so nice. The headmaster was so agreeable, too, and one felt safer always with a clergyman, didn’t one? The school cap, school tie, and school blazer—crimson and royal blue—might have been those of a real public school; Mr. and Mrs. Parham Groves never inquired into the qualifications of the staff that the Rev. Mr. Bowindow had assembled nor even into the equipment of such things as the science lab. The school seemed as good or better than those of their own youth, and much more gentlemanly. The unfortunate Gilbert left school, in consequence, hardly half as well educated as the “county-school cads”, and without either qualifications for or prospects of a job.