Scornful Moon

by Gee, Maurice

  More careful then, but wordy still, Wybrow continued: ‘Your Honour, it is part of my duty, which I willingly accept, to exonerate the unfortunate young man, Moody, from all blame in this matter. I fully acknowledge that no responsibility whatsoever can be attached to him for the dreadful events that occurred in the accused’s office. They do not reflect on his character in the slightest way. Mr Moody’s action must meet with the commendation of all right-thinking men. I say this with the full concurrence and approval of the accused.’

  ‘Who does he think he’s representing?’ Eric whispered.

  I looked at Joll. His eyes seemed thoughtful but unconcerned. He was gone from the day and the proceedings. He’s absent, I thought. All this is happening without him.

  Wybrow came back to his business. The accused, he said, was a man of considerable attainments. He had worked his way up from humble beginnings, had done sufficiently well at school to have continued his education at the university, had he wished, and perhaps entered one of the professions, but he chose instead to go into business and make his mark there. He had been a member of the Territorial Army, had been an early volunteer in the Great War, where he rose to the rank of First Lieutenant. He was mentioned in dispatches for an act of extraordinary gallantry at Messines. The pistol used in the shooting was a souvenir of that war. The accused had kept it in his office for protection in these uncertain times. That was unfortunate but many men in his financial position would do the same.

  ‘You must not excuse illegalities, Mr Wybrow,’ Sir Michael said.

  ‘No Your Honour, it’s not my intention.’ Wybrow took a sip of water, then looked into his glass as though he might find a drowned fly there. Yet he had good things left to say about Joll: he ran his business efficiently, and with honesty — ask any man who had dealt with him. His career in local body politics was notable and his ambition to higher office a matter of record. He might soon have occupied an important position, one of the most honourable his fellow citizens could bestow.

  Wybrow sipped again. He had come to the matter he did not wish to discuss. Reluctance hampered his wordiness, but after a stumble he managed both precision and reserve.

  ‘Now — I scarcely know what to say.’

  ‘Take your time, Mr Wybrow.’

  ‘Your Honour — he finds himself in this position, facing this charge. It’s a matter for deep concern and regret. I draw Your Honour’s attention to the underlying cause in justification of the accused and in the hope of mitigating the sentence to be passed.’ Wybrow wiped his mouth with his handkerchief — perhaps to wipe away ‘justification’, for there was none.

  ‘Your Honour, inquiries have been made. And it has been found that for a number of years the accused has been suffering from homosexual monomania. I have gone into the matter considerably with him and believe I am justified in speaking of the efforts he has made to cure himself. He has consulted doctors and metaphysicians. I have statements here from one of the doctors and one of the metaphysicians, and both attest to the accused’s deep distress at his condition and the strenuous efforts he has made to return himself to a normal state.’

  Wybrow handed the statements to Sir Michael, who glanced at them and put them aside. He nodded at Wybrow to continue.

  ‘Your Honour, for some months the accused has been suffering from overwork and mental strain. He has been attempting to expand his business while at the same time taking important steps to increase his involvement in public life. There has also been his constant deep-seated worry about his medical condition. All these matters, along with the sudden threat of exposure and consequent ruin, the pain and disgrace to his family, the loss of his ambitions and the opportunity to serve his community and country — these things, Your Honour, drove him to extremities and unhinged his mind, with the results that have been described.

  ‘I ask you to take them into account and in your judgement temper justice with mercy.’

  Sir Michael thanked him. The court rose for half an hour to give him time to read the documents handed to him.

  • • •

  We did not stray far from the court. There was a great curiosity to see Joll sentenced and we did not wish to risk losing our seats.

  ‘He’s a lucky man,’ Dudley Aimer said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Just half an inch the other way and he’d have been hanged.’

  ‘He might have got away with his story,’ Eric said.

  ‘An accident? With a bullet in the middle of the chest? Who’d buy that?’

  ‘Young Moody’s the sort of man to play with a loaded gun.’

  ‘I wish I could see him. Is he some sort of pretty boy? A Valentino?’

  ‘No, he’s not. He’s a damn fool, though, trying to beat down a man like Joll. Why couldn’t he let it lie? Just get out of there instead of stirring up muck?’

  ‘And let Joll get into Parliament?’ I said, astonished.

  ‘Yes, yes, we all know what you think,’ Eric said. ‘Ah, it’s time. Let’s go and see justice done.’

  Sir Michael dispensed it without drama. His tone was regretful more than condemnatory. I could not help thinking, He’s a Jew, there are centuries and histories behind him.

  Joll faced him with folded arms. I imagined that a beam of recognition passed between them. I don’t mean of a sexual sort, God forbid, or of acquaintanceship, for they were acquainted, but of (I put it as simply as I can) human understanding. Joll was neither defiant nor accepting. He was resigned. He was, if I don’t mistake it, faintly amused. I’ve no doubt he suffered agonies, and suffers them still, but this moment, his sentencing, this ending of his life in the world, interested him. He gave it a small nod of greeting.

  Sir Michael, speaking evenly, as though giving advice, told him he was sorry to see him in this position. Told him his career in business had been successful and his behaviour exemplary, as far as was known. His contributions to public life had been useful, while his ambition to serve in a higher political sphere was, Sir Michael accepted, honest and without taint. He might have gone far. He might have had a brilliant career. Instead he found himself here, in the dock, facing a most serious charge.

  ‘Your attempt at murder was an impulsive act. Mr Moody’s statement indicates that, and these statements from the doctor and the person describing himself as a metaphysician show that you have made more than one attempt to find a cure for the condition — which cannot, however, be described as medical — that afflicts you. I take that into account.

  ‘I hope that you will redeem yourself. You have taken a first step in that direction by pleading guilty.

  ‘I have been asked to pass sentence with compassion and mercy. But the ideal of justice is that human life is sacred, otherwise the community is doomed.’

  Sir Michael pushed his notes aside. He sentenced Oliver Joll to fifteen years’ imprisonment with hard labour.

  Chapter Ten

  He vanished from sight and will fade from memory. I have taken on, unwillingly, the job of preserving him, in order that, in some future time, others may look at him floating in my jar, in my solution, Oliver Joll, and say, Yes, interesting, poor chap, what a tragedy, what a waste of talents, what darkness there, what an ugly worm feeding inside — all of that, which I’ll accept, and say, I’ve done my job, what you make of him is up to you. I think and feel the way I must.

  Now I have a further job: to look at the others. I am equally unwilling for that.

  Early October. Joll is gone. His wife has changed her name and shifted to another town. New entertainments carry us along: Jeanette Macdonald and Nelson Eddy in Naughty Marietta; Noel Coward in The Scoundrel. The Mareo case in Auckland shunts the Joll case further into the distance down the line. Mussolini launches his war on Abyssinia, and a thousand policemen fail to control fighting between negroes and Italians in Harlem. In Wellington, Viscount Galway opens the Academy of Fine Arts exhibition in the Whitmore Street Gallery and detects the emergence of a New Zealand school — ‘artists
who have not had the opportunity of receiving tuition in the Old Land’. Charlie has two watercolours in but no one buys them. Harold Fine calls them ‘more pleasing than is usual for this artist’ in his review.

  I said to Eric, ‘How is she getting on out there? Have you seen her?’

  ‘She’s housekeeping. She’s washing James’s socks and ironing his shirts.’

  ‘What about Mrs Hearn?’

  ‘She’s sacked. Ferrabee couldn’t get on with her.’

  The following day a deputation of Melling members of the National Political League (the old Coalition) waited on James. He consented to be the party’s official candidate in the November elections.

  He tried to avoid the hustings. He meant to be voted in because he was James Tinling. His record would speak for him, while his natural gift of — let’s call it superiority — stood him out from his Labour opponent like a racehorse from a donkey pulling a cart. (I’ve stolen that from Dudley Aimer’s cartoon, which showed the donkey patient and sturdy, while John Citizen examined the horse’s teeth.)

  At those meetings he could not avoid, James abandoned his bogus vulgarity. He stood in a long and honourable tradition of service (by which he meant, but did not say, noblesse oblige), of rectitude and head-down honest work for a fair reward, and, where all else failed, the helping hand. The helping hand must never become a principle of policy, or the foundations of civil government would fail and that noble structure, the ordered society, fall into the morass of socialism.

  ‘He said that?’ Eric asked me, amazed.

  ‘It says so here.’

  ‘Let’s go and hear him.’

  Rose would not come. It was ‘too soon after Violet’ for James to see his family ‘goggling at him fishy eyed’. May could not. She had taken on, at short notice, the job of secretary to the Women’s Welfare League and was swamped with work.

  Eric and I drove out to the Hutt without our wives. It was a cool spring night with a clear sky and a full moon.

  ‘Earth’s crystal paramour,’ Eric said.

  ‘Yes, don’t tell me.’ Shelley again.

  We were late arriving and the meeting had begun. A dozen cars were parked outside the hall, James’s among them, with Lennie Ferrabee sitting at ease on the running-board. He rolled a cigarette as we approached.

  ‘Evening, gents,’ he said, after licking it.

  ‘Shouldn’t you be inside supporting your boss?’

  ‘I hear enough of him at home. Did you see what happened to my old boss, eh? I always thought he smelled of oh dee colognee. I wonder how he’ll get on cracking rocks.’ He grinned wide-mouthed, with monkey cheeks; stood up from the running-board and took his matches out. ‘Charlotte couldn’t come tonight. She’s got a headache.’

  ‘Listen, Ferrabee,’ I began.

  ‘Lennie, not Ferrabee, Mr Holloway.’

  ‘Lennie,’ Eric said, ‘I’ll tell you something, free advice. Keep away from Miss Tinling. If I hear one more time that you’ve been pestering her …’

  ‘She’s got her old man looking after her.’

  ‘One more time, I’ll come out and teach you a lesson you won’t forget.’

  ‘You think you could do that?’

  ‘Oh yes.’ Eric grinned at him. ‘And I think you know it.’

  I pulled his arm. ‘Come on. Don’t even talk to him.’ Ferrabee looked ready to fight. I had the impression he would be deadly: that he would bait Eric like a bear and leave him, bleeding, half a turn behind. I pulled him again.

  Ferrabee laughed and lit his cigarette. ‘You’ve got a good second there, Prof.’ He flicked his burning match over our heads.

  ‘Come on.’ We went along to the hall entrance. ‘What’s he been doing with Charlie?’

  Eric made a sound of disgust. ‘Remarks that can mean one thing or the other. You know, he’s smart. “I wouldn’t wear that dress, Miss Tinling.” Meaning, It doesn’t suit you, or maybe, Take it off for me, darlin’, OK?’

  ‘Does she tell James?’

  ‘She’s tried once or twice. James said something to him but he doesn’t stop. I’ll go out there. I wasn’t kidding.’

  In the hall, we found the simmer of good fellowship that precedes uproar. Melling is a mixed electorate. It runs south into Petone, taking in factory workers, many of them unemployed, and over to Hutt, where Walter Nash was (still is) the member, but includes pockets of the well-to-do, enough to make it marginal. James had been its member until his loss two elections before. He must have thought his constituents had recognised their mistake — how else explain his confidence?

  Douglas Drake was the Labour candidate. There was also Clive Gleeson, a Social Crediter, and Toby Small, a Democrat. Small was finishing as we went in. We might have been listening to James. The Democrats were the broken bits of Campbell Begg’s New Zealand Legion, old Reform Party men, sheep farmers with anarchist tendencies, businessmen who wanted no state theft of ‘the blood of our endeavour and bone of our hard work’, as Toby Small, his fists pumping, declared in his peroration.

  ‘Don’t give us that manure,’ cried a jokester near the back.

  We found a place beside the door as hoots of laughter reddened Small’s face.

  ‘Next,’ cried the men. ‘Give us little Duggie, Duggie Duck.’

  First they had to listen to the Social Crediter, and then they had to listen to James.

  He began, ‘Well, ladies and gentlemen, you know me.’

  ‘No we don’t. Who are you? You’re Gordon Coates’s shoe-shine boy. You’re the so-and-so that eats the cake while our kids don’t even get any bread,’ and so on.

  ‘Well, he asked for it. He used to be good at reading meetings,’ Eric said.

  James made no step back, no appeal to the chairman. Had he seen that there were votes he would never get, voters he need not waste argument on, and that his supporters would want him measured and calm and above the fray, virtute securus? His eyes found them here and there, picked them out and sent them the message of his demeanour; and when the hall was quiet enough, he went on: ‘You know me, gentlemen, for a man who tells the truth, no matter what company he finds himself in.’

  He waited out the uproar again. He took his watch from his fob pocket — offensive in itself, a watch like that — and calmly wound it; and it seemed crazy to me, for there must be working men in the hall who would vote for him from that old ineradicable conservatism they carry in them like a ganglion on a nerve. James was saying, I’m not here to talk to you, you don’t count. I’ve never seen a worse political performance. Yet there was good politics in it too, if you count the way he made his hecklers perform for the voters he was only partly sure of. Had he studied them as Small and Gleeson spoke, and seen that he could frighten them with a mob and secure them with James Tinling, gentleman?

  He used only ten minutes of his allotted twenty. I had never heard his voice so sharp and thin. It cut like a chisel, stabbed with dismissive epithets and kept a sawmill buzz at the edge. These are the facts, he said; and, I am untouchable, seemed to say. When he spoke to the workmen it was not only to them, for he sent a message over their heads, by some sleight of intonation, to those who would agree that uneducated men could not hope to understand the ways in which money works and countries are run.

  ‘I’ll keep it simple,’ James said at the end. ‘The Labour Party makes all this noise about “using the public credit” and “issuing sufficient money to meet the needs of the nation”. This is bush economics, my friends. All it will do is create worthless paper money. You’ll see it fluttering in the streets and not even bother to pick it up. Five pounds will not be worth five pence. It’s printing-press money. They are ignorant men you propose to follow. They’re from Australia, most of them, aren’t they? And they come to you with their talk of creating credit and putting up your wages and starting pension schemes, while they haven’t the slightest notion of what it means. They think they’ll sit in their brand-new offices and sign bits of paper and it’s done. What folly. The
y’ll be signing for higher taxes, that’s all. They’ll be signing your future out of existence. They’ll be bringing down the institutions that generations of honest men, generations of hard-working New Zealanders have built up by the sweat of their brow. They’ll wreck the banks you’ve put your savings in —’

  ‘What savings?’ the men cried.

  Indeed, what savings? How had James got so out of touch? He waited for the shouting to subside, then said, ‘I’ve told you what I think and I won’t say any more, except this: If you want the evils of a foreign creed, if you want economic ruin and monetary disease and a country that’s no more than a heap of bones, you’ll vote for the man you call Duggie Duck, but if you’d sooner put a vertebral column and a spinal cord into this nation you’ll give your vote to James Tinling and the National Political League.’

  He went back to his seat, sat down with slow precision and became as absent from proceedings as Oliver Joll had been from his sentencing.

  ‘Duggie, Little Duggie, Duggie Duck,’ supporters cried, as the squat little fellow stepped out. Instead of stopping midway between the table and the front of the stage, he went right to the edge, overlapped it with his toes, bent and put his hands on his knees, and said, ‘Fellow workers, you know me.’

  They whistled and cheered, while the backs of James’s supporters stiffened with indignation or contracted with sudden fear.

  ‘I’m the man who’ll tell you how this government of lawyers and fat farmers and their stooges has put its boot on you and kept it there for the last ten years — longer than that, since the war. How they’ve herded you like cattle into camps, with their stock-whips cracking.’ (Drake grew up in Australia.) ‘You know the places I’m talking about. Aka Aka, up the valley, eh? How many of you have been there? Yes, so have I, and got callouses on my hands to show for it, while they get — these Reform and Liberal fellows, yes that’s their name, it’s a new hat they’re wearing but the same old face underneath — they get their callouses on their bums from their office chairs.’