As Berry and I Were Saying

by Dornford Yates

  “The house had no telephone, and I don’t think the police had cars. So it was quite a long time before they arrived. Of course they did all they could, but all wheels turned more slowly in 1909. It was two nights later that a constable was walking his beat in a neighbouring town. He was passing a yard which was shut by iron-barred gates. As usual, he threw the beam of his lantern round the yard. And he saw a man. He asked him what he was doing. The man’s answers didn’t satisfy him, so he had him out of the yard and marched him off. The station-sergeant wasn’t any better satisfied than his subordinate, so the man was charged and detained. ‘Loitering on enclosed premises with intent to commit a felony.’ Early the following morning, this particular police-station received the description of the man who had murdered the master of The Grange. And when they looked again at the man they had put in a cell – well, he tallied with the description in every way.

  “It was the deadest case I ever knew. He was put up for identification and all three women instantly picked him out. It appeared that he was a cousin of the dead man, that he was a ne’er-do-well, that he knew The Grange and, by the dead man’s orders, had recently been turned from its doors. He bore such traces of the struggle as you would expect to find: his coat was torn, his arms were bruised and his hands were cut. The account he gave of his movements could hardly be checked. When asked about the cuts on his hands, he said he had broken the window of a baker’s shop in order to steal a loaf. He couldn’t give the name of the village, and, though inquiries were made, no baker’s shop was found to confirm his report. When asked about his movements upon the fatal night, he said he was in the bar of a certain public house. This was too far from The Grange for him to have committed the crime. When seen, the landlord denied this. On second thoughts, however, the landlord said he was there. In other words, his evidence was unsatisfactory. And this particular landlord was very well known to the police, as a most unscrupulous man. The revolver and knife, of course, had disappeared.

  “Well, the man was committed for trial and was later tried. He went into the witness-box and denied that he was the man. His only witness was the landlord, who came unwillingly to Court and went to pieces in the box. The Judge summed up against him, and the jury retired. Everyone thought they’d be out for a quarter of an hour. They weren’t. They were out for four hours. And then they came back and found the fellow ‘Not guilty’. So he was released.

  “Everyone was astounded. As I have said, it was the deadest case. But juries will be juries, and that was that.

  “When the tumult had died, something – I don’t know what – came to the knowledge of the police. Two months later another man was arrested and, to everyone’s amazement, charged with the crime. There was quite a lot against him. He was proved to have been in the vicinity of The Grange on the night of the crime. In his possession was a revolver: a bullet fired from this was found to bear exactly the markings which were borne by the bullet which was taken from the dining-room’s wall. Finally, when he was stood side by side with the man who had been acquitted, it was immediately seen that no man could tell them apart. They were facsimiles.

  “Now I don’t want to sound old-fashioned, but it has always been my honest belief that God Himself intervened and directed that jury to spare that first man’s life. There is no other explanation. It was the deadest case.”

  “That is history,” said Daphne.

  “I don’t go as far as that: but, at least, it’s true.”

  “What did you leave out?” said Jill.

  “Nothing of consequence, darling, as your inquiry shows.”

  “Who was the Judge?” said Berry.

  “I can’t remember. God knows it wasn’t his fault. But it must have shaken him up.”

  “Let’s have some more about receivers.”

  “It’s your turn now.”

  “One more – featuring ‘the fence’.”

  “Give me some port,” said I. “My throat’s getting sore.”

  Berry replenished my glass with tawny port.

  “If,” he said, “you knew how to produce your voice…”

  “I know,” said I, “I know. Strangely enough, it never got sore at the Bar.”

  “You never had a big enough brief.”

  “There’s something in that,” said I.

  “Rot,” said Jill. “Boy’s got the most powerful voice I’ve ever heard.”

  “That is irrelevant, but true. The fog-horn type. When he was calling Nobby, the Vicar’s nose used to bleed. And now for the receiver: he always interested me.”

  “Not half as much,” said I, “as he interested the police. But the receiver was always extremely hard to hit.

  “When I left Muskett’s office, after one year with him, I was called to the Bar. The following day I entered Treasury Chambers – as a pupil, of course. And there I spent one year.

  “One day a case came in – The King against Goldschmidt: and when I opened the brief I found it was ‘Cammy’ Goldschmidt, a most notorious fence. We’d been laying for him for years, for he was behind four-fifths of the really big things. But he wasn’t charged with receiving: he was charged with harbouring, a little known offence. Harbouring is comforting a man whom you know to have committed a felony. For harbouring, you can get two years’ hard labour: but for receiving you can be sent to penal servitude for fourteen years.

  “Well, the thing was this. The police were unable to get Cammy on a charge of receiving, because he was too damned shrewd: but they were always ready, in case he should put a foot wrong. And now that was what he had done.

  “Cammy Goldschmidt lived in style. He’d a very nice house in Hampstead, he kept his carriage and horses and he dressed in Savile Row. One rainy night an old lag came to his door, with a cart and horse. His arrival was reported to Cammy – by the butler or parlour-maid. And, though he was very much vexed, Cammy thought it best to go to the door himself. Now Cammy’s instinct was to send the fellow away: but the lag knew rather too much, and, if he had turned nasty, it might not have been so good. So Cammy allowed him to stay and to sleep in a stable with his horse. But the horse and cart had been stolen, as Cammy very well knew. God knows how these things get round, but somebody talked – with the happy result that the biggest receiver in London was sent for trial on a charge of harbouring a thief.

  “From our point of view, it was a rotten case. In the first place, one’s sympathy is always with the hunted, and one finds it hard to blame a man who has given shelter to such unfortunates. In the second place, the case against Cammy was almost painfully thin, and the witnesses for the Crown were by no means above reproach. Still, it was so very important that such a receiver as Cammy should be out of action – if only for two or three months, that the Director of Public Prosecutions determined to have a stab.

  “Cammy was confident. He instructed Charles Gill, QC, a very eminent counsel and a master of the art of defence. Indeed, I must frankly confess that, if I had been offering odds, I’d have given twenty to one against the Crown. What was so galling was that City of London juries are very shrewd. And had the jury, in whose charge Cammy would be, had the faintest idea of the truth, they would have sent him down without leaving the box. But they wouldn’t know the truth, and we couldn’t put them wise.

  “Now, about this case, there was one curious thing. Among our witnesses – we only had two or three – was a man to whom Cammy had once given great offence. That was probably why he was bearing witness against him. Now this witness knew perfectly well who Cammy was: and he knew, as did all of us, that it was almost grotesque that so important a receiver of stolen goods should be arraigned only upon such a trifling charge. But that, of course, was neither here nor there. Cammy was charged with harbouring: and any reference to his activities as a receiver could not be allowed.

  “Before the Judge took his seat, Gill approached Travers Humphreys, who was appearing for the Crown. ‘You probably know,’ he said, ‘that one of your witnesses dislikes my client very much.’ ‘Ye
s,’ says Humphreys, ‘I do.’ ‘Well, you’ll be careful, won’t you, to keep his nose to his proof?’ ‘I promise you that.’

  “The case was tried by Bosanquet. He was the Common Serjeant – a first-rate lawyer and a delightful man. He was aged and pale as death, and there were times when he sat so still and so silent that a man might be pardoned for thinking that he was dead. I once heard this unusual appearance commented upon – by a lady who had hoped for six months, to whom of his wisdom he had given five years. ‘You – old corpse,’ she said. And Bosanquet led the laughter against himself.

  “Well, he came on to the Bench and Cammy entered the dock. He was something over-dressed. The cut of his morning dress left nothing to be desired, but the slip to his waistcoat, his button-hole and his patent-leather boots looked out of place. He was given a chair, and sat on it, lolling and smiling and watching Gill.

  “The Crown presented its case, and it was painfully clear that the jury was unimpressed. I never remember a jury that looked so bored.

  “The last witness we called was Cammy’s enemy. Humphreys was as good as his word and took the greatest care to ‘keep his nose to his proof’.”

  “What does that mean?” said Jill.

  “A witness’ proof is a statement of what he is going to say. It is by no means a statement of all he knows. But it is a statement of all that he is allowed to say in any particular case.

  “Now the evidence he gave was not of great importance: it certainly rounded our case, but it did Cammy’s next to no harm. It was very short, and very soon Humphreys sat down. And then Gill made a mistake…

  “I know that’s a big thing to say, for Gill was a brilliant man, whose little finger was thicker than my loins. But I can’t help that. Perhaps it was Homer nodding. Be that as it may, he made a bad mistake. He failed to leave well alone. In other words, he rose to cross-examine a witness who had done his case no harm, who he knew was dangerous.”

  “But that’s elementary,” said Berry.

  “I know. I hate to say it of Gill, for nobody could have been kinder than he was to me. He asked me to enter his Chambers, which I always felt was a very high compliment. He was almost the finest cross-examiner of his day. But that was nothing. I have sat beside him and seen him extended. And Gill extended made a man hold his breath. By the sheer force of his tremendous personality, I have seen him bend to his will five most hostile Justices of the Peace. Not a jury, mark you. Five cultured English gentlemen, accustomed to dispensing justice. And against their better judgment, he made those men grant bail. It was a great achievement, and only a very great man could have brought it about.

  “And now we’ll go back to Cammy.

  “Gill rose to cross-examine. And these were his only words. ‘In fact, you know very little about it?’ The witness laughed. Then he pointed at Cammy. ‘I only know he’s the biggest receiver in London – an’ so does everyone else.’

  “‘Stand down,’ says Bosanquet, sternly.

  “The witness left the box.

  “But the damage was done. At the witness’ words, the jury sat up as one man. It was just as though they had had an electric shock. And Cammy turned a very unpleasant green.

  “When he summed up the case, the Judge did his best. He told the jury plainly that the witness had no right to say what he did and that they must put his words right out of their minds. But he might as well have told the sun to stand still. At any rate, good as he was, he wasn’t up to Joshua’s standard.

  “The jury retired, and Gill sat comforting himself with the reflection that he would have little difficulty in getting the conviction quashed by the Court of Criminal Appeal.

  “And then the jury returned – and blew his hopes sky-high. They found Cammy guilty, of course. But they added a rider. ‘We should like to say,’ said the foreman, ‘that the irrelevant remark made by the witness – has in no way influenced the decision to which we have come.’ Well, no one – not even Gill – could have won an appeal after that. If you remember, I said that City of London juries were very shrewd.”

  “My God, what a show,” said Berry. “What did Bosanquet give him?”

  “As far as I can remember – eighteen months.”

  3

  “I always find it,” said Berry, “matter for regret that I have never been accorded the privilege of observing an apparition. All sorts and conditions of people, whose qualifications and merits in no way compare with mine, have been so accommodated. But though, on more than one occasion, I have passed lack-lustre hours in the most sinister surroundings – because, of course, I had accepted some liar’s advice – never has any apparition stalked or stumbled or floated into my view. Once I undoubtedly heard the note of a bell, but, though my host assured me that that was a phantom sound, I found myself unable to ignore the indisputable fact that there were within earshot quite thirty old-fashioned swing-bells, any one of which, had it been set in motion, could have produced the note. I am, therefore, forced to the conclusion that, while ghosts interest me, I do not interest ghosts: my addresses have been rejected: it is now, indeed, some years since I made up my mind no longer to seek the acquaintance of personalities so ungracious and so blind. But I must confess to disappointment. I’ve heard so many reports of spectres that have been seen and sometimes heard, of lights that have been extinguished by no known agency, of doors that were shut – and have opened, of stairs that have creaked beneath some unseen weight… Still, my disappointment is tempered by this – that only on one occasion have I been rendered such a report by a man who saw a spectre with his own eyes. His statement diminished all hearsay, once for all. For reasons which will appear, I have no hesitation in passing it on.

  “I was staying at a château in France before the first war, and among the guests was a Major Andrew —, of a famous Scottish Regiment, to which the sons of his house had always gone. He was a very quiet man and kept a lot to himself: but we always got on very well, and I think he knew me better than anyone else. One thing about him stood out – he was intensely practical. His lack of imagination hit me between the eyes. This emerged from our conversation over and over again. While such a trait in a soldier used to be a good fault, I had a definite feeling that such a man would never go very far. I may have been wrong there, for he was most intelligent.

  “Now it was the custom at the château for the women to retire in good time and the men to bid them good night and repair to a smoking-room. This was a spacious apartment, very well found. And there we would sit and talk for an hour or more. The company included more than one eminent man, whose light conversation was most agreeable: but one night a foolish, rich man decided to take the floor. Accordingly, he retailed a ghost story which I had been told as a child: when he had done, some other fool had to beat this well-worn tale, and for the next half hour all the old stock ghost stories were trotted out. Before they were done, the eminent men had withdrawn, and the audience gradually shrivelled, until Major — and I were almost the only two left. He had said nothing at all, and I remember thinking of the contempt with which so practical a man must have regarded such reports. Discouraged by our demeanour, the last of the fabulists made some excuse to retire, and Major — and I were left to ourselves.

  “For a little we did not speak, but savoured the blessed silence which supervened. It was rather like turning off the wireless. I was just about to break this – by a singularly destructive criticism of our late tormentors, when he addressed me.

  “‘I once saw an apparition.’

  “I hope I didn’t show it, but I never was so much astonished in all my life. It was as if an archangel had said, ‘I once had an affair with a chorus-girl.’ Then I realized I was on to something extremely rare – a first-hand report by a man who was quite incapable not only of lying, but of embellishing the truth.

  “‘Please tell me,’ I said.

  “‘I’m afraid it’s a rather long story.’

  “‘So much the better,’ said I.

  “‘Well, I live i
n Lincolnshire. The house is too big for us, so we’ve shut up two-thirds of the building and live in one of the wings. Once a month, I take the carpenter with me and go round the whole of the bit we keep shut up – in case the rain’s come in or something like that. One day we were on the first floor, when I opened the door of a room, and there was an old fellow, wading across the floor. He was wearing black breeches and stockings and a good-looking plum-coloured coat. He had a wig on his head and an ebony cane in his hand. His face was whimsical.

  “‘Well, my first impulse was to run downstairs, to see if his legs were sticking out of the ceiling below.’ (Is that or is that not the statement of a practical man?) ‘Then I decided to wait and see where he went. He crossed the floor, still wading, and disappeared into a cupboard.

  “‘If I’d had any sense, I should have run into the next room, but I never thought of that until too late. Instead, I called the carpenter, who was a room or two behind, and told him to take up a floor-board. Sure enough, there was another floor, about twelve inches below. So I think there can be no doubt that the apparition was treading the original floor. Then we examined the cupboard. This was very shallow, and once had been a doorway which led to the adjoining room.

  “‘A few days after this my wife and I went out to tea. We went to a country house about the same size as ours, in which, as a matter of fact, my people had resided a good many years ago. But the strange thing was this – that our house was really the home of the people that lived in it now. In a word, about a hundred years ago, the two families had exchanged houses. The present owner was a contemporary of my father and he lived there with his daughter who was about my age. And though they lived very quietly, we had been asked to tea, because he wanted to meet his old friend’s son.