The applicability of the words was but too evident: he blushed in the middle of the silence and abandoned for the moment the attempt to think.
Two jurors, however, did find their opinions appear suddenly and sharply in their minds. These were the two women, the members of the gentler sex, as they had been referred to by Mr. Proudie; the two whom Dr. Holmes had thought would need his kindly masculine guidance.
Victoria Atkins, once she settled down to consider the question, knew at once what she thought. For what is it that makes the average man or woman unwilling to convict another of murder? Most usually, a surprise and disbelief at the action itself. It seems to any peaceable and quiet person so unnatural and improbable an act. He pictures to himself the process of laying poison, or of driving in a knife, and at once an immense repulsion seizes him. He knows that he could not do it, and he does not believe that the ordinary-looking person in the dock has done it. Give him one-third of a chance, and he will say “Not guilty,” because the alleged act in itself seems preposterous. It is not done; it does not happen; it is not a part of the real world of newspapers and going to the office in the train. Any other explanation is to be preferred.
But suppose you had committed a murder yourself? Ah, then you know that that is all nonsense. Killing is easy, and the most respectable are as likely to do it as the others. Victoria Atkins reviewed the circumstances briefly and the facts became instantly clear to her. The van Beer woman had obviously scattered ivy poison on the child’s food to get its money, and had trusted to the incompetence of the old doctor to get away with it. In some ways a clever idea, Victoria thought; it was far less trouble than that of choking Aunt Ethel. Nothing like so nerve-wracking, either. But after all, nobody had found out about Aunt Ethel, whereas this woman had been caught by the police. Victoria consulted her conscience (if that be the word) on what verdict she should give. She reached an easy decision. When she was young she had been taught at the Home to be strictly truthful; old habits persisted, to the extent at least that she always told the truth when there was no clearly perceptible personal advantage to be gained by doing the opposite. She would say “guilty.” In any event, the case seemed so overwhelmingly clear to her that she did not expect her vote to have any particular importance. She would only be one of a crowd.
The mind of each juror was like the dashboard of a motor-car or some other like machine. There was in it the equivalent of a dial with a quivering needle above it, calibrated for negative and positive—for Not Guilty and Guilty. In nearly all the heads, if one had been able to look inside, the needle was shaking uneasily about neutral. Only the closest attention could have discovered if the wavering to one side was larger and more prolonged than the other. In one mind, George’s, the needle was dead still, fixed to neutral. The machine was not registering at all; it was disconnected.
Victoria Atkins’s needle had swung right round to Guilty. So too had Mrs. Morris’s. She had arrived at her decision more slowly than Victoria, and perhaps a little less firmly. But like Victoria she had been decided by considerations very far removed from the evidence. What had started her on her journey was, it is true, relevant to the case. It was a recollection of Mrs. Rodd’s account of the death of the rabbit: that had decided her that the woman in the dock was the kind of person to torment a child and a dumb animal. But what had been final for her was the memory of her short married life. Why had her life been ruined and her husband killed? For no other reason than that murder was not punished. The arm of the law was weak: after Les had died the police had explained to her again and again that they had not got the power to arrest all the likely suspects and force them to confess. In Germany, and for that matter in the United States too, the law wasn’t made a fool of like that. They fetched in everybody they suspected and if the guilty didn’t confess right away, they were made to, all right. Over there they knew how. But here they couldn’t even question people properly; and so Les was dead and not avenged. Alice Morris felt that by both sex and religion she belonged to the weak who needed protection. Death—unpunished killing—was too common and too near. Let the wall be high, the guns heavy, the defenders many, and above all let them shoot first at any disturbers and inquire afterwards. Les was gone; nothing would bring him back from the grave. But there were others, weren’t there? Alice Morris remembered a hot Sunday afternoon and a desolate East End street. The needle in her mind swung round to Guilty.
At that moment Mr. Popesgrove shifted back his chair and cleared his throat. All down the table there came the same sort of shuffling, blowing, and relieved fidgeting as occurs when the presiding master finishes an overlong grace at school dinner. Only Mr. Bryan did not move, but kept his face in his hands. Mr. Popesgrove looked at him inquiringly, but as he said nothing, decided to pay no attention. He turned to Victoria Atkins:
“Well, the five minutes is up now, and I think we should proceed. Can I have your opinion first, Miss Atkins—that is, if you have formed one?”
Miss Atkins’s face had a disagreeable expression. Her lips were held closely together. Her eyes were invisible behind gleaming glasses and her pressed down black hair looked like a wig. “I certainly have,” she said, and her voice was slum overlaid by servants’ gentility. “It seems to me there’s no doubt at all, and we ought to have done with this matter very quickly and be able to get off home. The boy was poisoned with ivy leaves: no one thinks it really was an accident. The woman bought the paper which showed her how to do it, she gets a fortune from his dying, and she was in the room when the poisoning must have been done. The lawyer for the Crown said very rightly, to my thinking, that you can’t have anything surer, short of catching her actually putting the poison in the salad. And that’s a thing what never happens—people don’t choose a time when they’re being watched to commit murder. All that the defence lawyer said was imagination, not facts. It’s perfectly true, as he said, that if we have any doubts we should refuse to convict. But the judge said that had to be reasonable doubt, and there isn’t any reasonable doubt. She had the motive, the opportunity, the means, and was practically seen doing it. Well, as I said, short of watching her do it, what do you want? No question to my mind: Guilty, I say.”
“Oh. Yes. I see.” Mr. Popesgrove had not expected anything so downright. “Of course, if you feel so definitely it is very proper to say so. But I think there is rather more to be said than that. Perhaps the other lady may be less drastic. Mrs. Morris?”
Alice Morris had powdered her nose and arranged her face while Victoria was speaking. Half of her mind had noted what the ugly old woman had said, half had stared with dislike at the unaltering pair of eyes that always stared back at her from that shiny rectangle of a mirror, shaped like a pillar box slot, cutting off all the rest of the face that might give them meaning. Stupid eyes, beady eyes, too-much-seen eyes. Les had called them beautiful, all the same. She was ready and waiting when Mr. Popesgrove called on her.
“I don’t see anything very drastic in what Miss Atkins says. I don’t think women on juries should look at evidence any differently to men. I know we are supposed to be softer and more gentle and so on, but that doesn’t seem to me to have anything to do with it. Actually, we need the protection of the law more than men do, if anything; and I’m sure every one would despise a woman for letting a criminal off out of sentimentality. The prisoner is guilty, or she’s not guilty, that’s all: we must decide just that and not think of consequences.
“Miss Atkins put very well the important facts, and they all point the one way. I won’t repeat them. I’ll only add one point, and that is this. We have to consider the character of the woman. If she’d been very gentle and kind, I don’t say that I wouldn’t have had my doubts, and have gone back over the evidence to see if there couldn’t have been any mistake. But look at what she was. I must say, I began to have my suspicions first when I heard about the way she treated the rabbit. For the child’s sake, indeed! I never heard such hypocrisy. Think of
her standing there, with the poor boy’s pet deliberately crammed into the oven and screaming itself to death, and her holding the child back, and enjoying it all. A woman who could do that would be capable of anything. I wouldn’t be happy, I couldn’t face my own conscience if I let her go from this court with all the wealth that she has got by this crime.
“I think she is a very dangerous and wicked woman and we must protect society against people like her. I hope I’m not speaking too much about general things, but I feel it’s specially important just now for every one to stand by the law and support the police. There’s crimes of violence everywhere and the police haven’t enough power. When they do act, they ought to be able to feel that the ordinary citizen, like you and me, will support them and not be led aside by any clever lawyer’s speech. I didn’t like that man and I don’t trust him. I’m sorry if I’m talking too much. I vote for ‘Guilty.’”
Here are the recording dials of some of the minds:
One more can be added:
Mr. Parham Groves, travelling salesman in encyclopedias, nearly a gentleman, spoke without being asked. He was sitting next Mrs. Morris, having planted himself near the only pretty woman with expert speed. He may have imagined that Popesgrove would ask him next anyway. He did not wait, however. There was nothing he did more quickly and instinctively than agree with an attractive girl in whatever she said. In a world which mostly rebuffed and ill-treated him this helped to secure him the only triumphs that he was commonly able to win.
“I absolutely agree,” he said. “That’s very well put, if I may say so, Mrs. Morris. There is no real doubt about the facts of the case, and the woman’s character makes the thing certain. You could hardly expect anything else. Look at what she used to be—a girl in a tobacconist’s shop. She got into a state of society where she had no right to be. She was surrounded by money, when all she was fitted for was”—well, what would be most tactful to say? Some of these people looked rather cads, too. Better be careful. “—was something far different. Take that sort of person out of her class and you ruin her. She’d had some money, so she wanted a lot more. She’d got no sound solid core to her—no education either. And this is what results.”
Francis Allen, the Socialist poet, had been patiently assembling as far as he could a Marxist interpretation of the evidence, but this was too much. “Nonsense!” he said. “That’s the most ridiculous, narrow-minded baseless class prejudice.” He spoke very loudly and his face was red.
“Gentlemen!” protested the foreman.
“Let me suggest,” said Dr. Holmes, intervening with his most didactic lecture-room voice, “that we examine the actual evidence as dispassionately as possible, and without heat. I think it may perhaps be possible for me to be of some little assistance. My profession is one in which I have every day to estimate the value of evidence—a rather different kind of evidence, it is true, but still: evidence. I am a scholar, a Fellow of an Oxford college, as a matter of fact, and I spend my life largely in restoring the correct text of ancient authors. The manuscripts have come down to us in a very corrupt form, and, without wearying you with the details of my profession, I will merely say that in establishing the true text we have to estimate the value of many differing kinds of evidence.
“In listening to this case I asked myself: ‘What evidence is there here which I would have to accept as unquestionably valid? What evidence would I class as suspect and second rate?’”
Dr. Holmes paused to clear his throat with a thick and rather disagreeable noise and to assemble his periods for his next paragraph. By now he had convinced himself that he had in fact dissected the evidence as he alleged. If he had been more given to self-analysis, he would have noticed that his conviction had only become firm after his fellow-jurors had spoken. The last speaker but one he had considered a seedy, lower-middle class snob, a fabricated half-gentleman, a lounger in suburban tennis clubs who imitated the genuine Oxford undergraduates. He aped gentility and he should be put down. As for the women, they were certain to be wrong, and it was ridiculous to let them air their sparrow-like ideas before he had spoken. He had not much minded the insignificant and sour woman in black. She looked and spoke like a housemaid: she seemed to be that type of woman and that was the only type of woman which gave Dr. Holmes no offence. There had to be waitresses, and persons to clean out the Fellows’ rooms and wash their stairs. It was bad management that a person like that should be on a jury, but at least she was not an object of disgust. Far other was the second woman, who was of course also screaming for blood, as women always did. Half-witted and with no sense of shame, she even painted and powdered her face in public when she was supposed to be deciding a fellow human being’s life or death. She smelt of perfume: she was a reeking piece of sex, in fact. There was nothing Dr. Holmes feared and hated more than feminine sex. Since Alice Morris had voted for death, it was fairly sure he would vote for life.
“I considered that nearly all the spoken evidence,” he continued, “must be put in the latter category, that of second grade evidence. Spoken evidence anyhow comes to us through a distorting medium—the medium of the human mind. All of us lie to a certain extent, merely because the memory is fallible and never photographically exact. I felt this was particularly true of the witnesses we have heard here. You have the policemen—they are honest, without doubt, but they have their natural inclination to make their case sound good; and in any case what they said amounted to very little. You have the doctors—one quite obviously senile, and the rest trying to put as good a face as they can on the fact that they were called in to cure the boy and only killed him. Poison, they cry, is the only possible explanation. Very natural, I am sure; but perhaps I am a cynical old gentleman. Certainly, I am not convinced. At my age you suspect that sort of expert statement: you’ve seen too many of them.”
“Aye, that’s true, sir,” said James Stannard, speaking aloud to his own surprise.
“You have a kitchenmaid who is far from intelligent, and a cook and gardener who are under very definite suspicion themselves. There is a newsagent who made a very poor showing under cross-examination and a tutor who made a worse one. And that is all the human evidence amounts to. A very poor and untrustworthy lot.
“The only evidence that we can rely on, as not having changed, is the documentary evidence. And there are two of these. One is the cutting from the Essex journal, one is the story of Sredni Vashtar which was read to us by the defence. These we can examine closely, and see what they mean. With them, we have at last come to solid ground. Let us take the first, the newspaper. It indicates very clearly that someone in that house knew that ivy dust was poisonous. That cannot be denied. But it does not tell us who had that knowledge. Nobody seems to know who ordered the paper in fact. That isn’t very surprising, if you consider the matter a minute. Well over a year has passed, and it’s very likely that it’s been perfectly honestly forgotten. Why should people have remembered a thing like that? What is certain, indeed, is only that that paper was in the house and any one may have read it and made his own deduction from it. Any one, including the boy.
“Now, the Sredni Vashtar story does carry us a little further. I cannot agree with the speaker who despises Sir Isambard Burns, the counsel for the defence. I think he has helped us very considerably. He may have prevented a grave miscarriage of justice. For with the Sredni Vashtar story we have at last a pointer towards a particular person. Nobody but the child is involved; the story points to no other person. He alone selected this extraordinary name for his pet, and no one else in the house even knew what it meant. We do now: the story leaves us in no doubt. Sredni Vashtar is the avenger. He is the guardian of an unhappy lonely small boy, who is tormented by an unkind aunt under the pretence of having his health safeguarded. De Ropp—van Beer; van Beer—De Ropp. How alike the names sound, and how disastrous the likeness has been! You remember what happened to this Mrs. De Ropp, the aunt who also killed her charge’s pet? Her th
roat was torn out. She was murdered, to the author’s and reader’s great delight, and the little boy was happy ever afterwards. This is a frightful story to have fallen in the hands of a morbid and unhealthy child anyway. When, in addition, he gives this name, this name which cannot conceivably come from any other source, to his pet, he has given incontrovertible proof that he took up the awful suggestion of that story. I haven’t very much doubt that he did try to poison her and only succeeded in poisoning himself. Poor little fellow: life didn’t hold much for him and perhaps it is better for him really. Anyway,” said Dr. Holmes briskly, recovering himself and brushing aside sentimentality, “there’s not the shadow of a case against the woman.”
“That’s very true,” said Mr. Stannard who had settled matters by his own processes of thought. “The fact that the police picked on her doesn’t mean a thing. Not anything at all.” The police, he added to himself, were busybodies and made trouble. And not above cadging drinks for nothing regularly: blackmail almost. Try and trap you the very next day, too, into serving after hours, likely as not.
Mr. Popesgrove broke in again, in case the discussion should get out of hand.
“And you, sir?” he said to the insignificant-looking young hairdresser’s assistant, Mr. David Elliston Smith. Mr. Elliston Smith had hardly a formed opinion yet, but he felt he must say something.
“I don’t care for the behaviour of the accused,” he remarked. “She didn’t go into the witness box, and she could have. A straightforward person would have done so. It means one thing, I say, and that is that she’s got something to hide.”
“I agree, I agree,” said his neighbour, Ivor Drake, the actor. “There is something sinister in that. Her whole attitude seemed to me suspicious. I watched her throughout the case.”
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