A Train of Powder

by West, Rebecca

  This was the first case he had conducted as senior prosecuting counsel for the government, and it was therefore watched with interest. This turned to dismay. On rising to cross-examine this man who had been accused of the appalling crime of stabbing and cutting up Mr. Setty, Mr. Christmas Humphreys asked him, in accents cold, with a loathing which suggested that he had detected him doing something far, far worse, whether he had not taken a blond girl called Teresa out to a night club and paid the bill with a rubber check. It was of course pleasant to think of him doing anything so relatively innocuous, but Mr. Humphreys suggested that this was the kind of thing that stabbing and cutting up people led to if done too often. He also alluded with horror to the fact that Hume had an overdraft at his bank, though British banks indulge, to an extent which Americans find astonishing, in the amiable habit of letting their clients run into debt with them, if they either deposit security, or get a solvent friend to give a personal guarantee, or exhibit symptoms of future solvency. Such is the economic disorder of England today that probably at least half the people in this court were living on overdrafts. There were many faces which failed to light up as Mr. Humphreys suggested that Hume had been so distressed at having an overdraft that Mr. Setty’s notes had offered him an irresistible temptation. Other suggestions of his brought forward as a reason for the butchery included even more common signs of indigence. He made much of the fact that Hume had pawned a suit. Yet it is part of the curious economics of pawnbroking that there are many objects for which pawnbrokers give much more than their second-hand value; and a large section of the population pawns things all its life, and a still larger section pawns things quite a lot when it is young, and yet neither habitually engages in murder. He cut an even wider swathe when he mentioned portentously that Hume had often been some days late in paying the rent. By this time the court was looking on Mr. Humphreys with awe as a financial virgin, who felt as strongly about his state as the Lady in Comus felt about hers and would have claimed at any moment that So dear to Heav’n is Saintly solvency That when a soul is found sincerely so, a thousand liveried Angels lackey her.

  Rage rang in his voice, and it was very odd to remember his last book. He is quite an accomplished writer. His book on The Great Pearl Robbery of 1913 is one of the classics of criminal literature; it conveys the peculiarly cosy character of British crime as it was before the First World War far better than any detective novel. He has also published several works on Buddhism, the chief of which is Concentration and Meditation. The last, Via Tokyo, is the record of his trip to Japan as a junior counsel for the British government in the International War Trial. It contains little about his legal mission, for he is preoccupied by his awed delight in the stillness and formality of the East, as they were exhibited in the Buddhist shrines and schools of dancing which he visited in Japan and the countries through which he travelled.

  The emotional climax of his journey was his surrender to the Zen sect of Buddhism. This is a rarefied form of the faith, in which stupidity is regarded as the first enemy, to be overcome by the intellect, which, when it has been trained to its highest capacity, becomes the second enemy, to be overcome by the development of a higher faculty of wisdom. The means by which the intellect is transcended includes the asking of koan, refined conundrums for which there is no logical answer, and the practice of mondo, dialogues between master and pupil which sound like nonsense because they are carried on above the plane where sense holds good. As the pupil progresses he is rewarded with flashes of satori, immediate understanding, and his ultimate aim is to stop thinking and have no need for thought, because as soon as he becomes aware of a problem he himself becomes its solution. He enters into it by intuition, as he can enter into all things in the universe, without effort, by tranquil acceptance. Via Tokyo shows that its author is in love with tranquillity. In one of the poems which are scattered through the volume he writes of his regret that he must leave “the golden cool serene” of his room in a Japanese house; and his pages are covered with his desire to discard all hot emotions and intellectual superfluities and make himself an empty chalice to receive the wine of mysticism.

  Yet the Old Bailey has not for many years witnessed anything like Mr. Christmas Humphreys’ cross-examination of Hume. It was Hume’s intention to be gaily impudent, and he soon found a way of mentioning that an escaped criminal lunatic called the Mad Parson, for whom all the police forces of England were searching, had lived for months unmolested in lodgings directly opposite the London police station where he himself had been detained and examined. But nobody can be funny for long when he is being tried for such a crime; there is something in everybody which forbids it. Soon Hume began to bicker and yelp and snarl, and nothing was said to him which might have exorcised him. Mr. Humphreys had several times described Hume as an inveterate romancer, so it happened that when he said to Hume, “I suggest that you stabbed Setty in the sitting room and that he died in the dining room,” Hume snapped back, “Now you’re romancing,” and when Mr. Humphreys went on, “And that you cut him up that night,” Hume pouted out his lips in insolence and sneered, “Absolute baloney.” The horrid subject matter was being discussed in too appropriate a style. From Mr. Humphreys’ book it had appeared that one of the most intense pleasures he had experienced on his journey to the East, indeed, perhaps in all his life, was his stay in a Zen monastery, the Temple of Full Enlightenment, founded seven hundred years ago, a place of mellowed wood and grey-green tiles, set among flowering trees below a sandstone cliff. There was a Great Bell there, older than the Temple, at the top of a rising venue of worn grey steps. In this home of pure mysticism, purged of formality, nobody minded the bell being sounded at any time by anybody who was moved to sound it. So he used to go up the long steep stairs to the bell whenever he had time to take refuge in this Temple, and strike it to announce his coming, fusing himself with its ancient, harmonious voice.

  There was a war of philosophical principles here. Mr. Humphreys is a fastidious person who is displeased with what man has made of the earth, and has therefore always distrusted the common practises of mankind and has put his faith in any alternative which has been less generally adopted. Ballet is not ordinary motion, therefore he adored it; prose is more habitually used than poetry, therefore he wrote poetry and read it aloud; he would not be satisfied by any rationalist view of the mind, he enjoyed the psychoanalytic reinstatement of the primitive; he rejected the findings of orthodox medicine for osteopathy and herbalism; he waved away modern agriculture; he would have nothing to do with the Christianity which lay at his hand shaped for the use of his Western personality, he insisted on going out of Europe into Asia to find a religion hardly modified by the spirit of recent centuries, which treated as insignificant that pampered darling of the West, the self.

  But Hume had nothing against the self. He showed this when the cross-examination became such a bitter wrangle that the judge had to check it, and reminded him that he must not answer counsel violently, telling him that the purpose of the trial was to make a necessary investigation and that there was nothing personal behind the questions put to him by his cross-examiner and therefore no occasion for heat. To this Hume replied, “But my life is a personal matter to me.” This was not only a very sensible remark, which the judge did not reject, it was a proclamation made with immense Byronic pride. Yet he made no claim that the life he wished to preserve showed any merit. No man ever went into a witness box to defend himself against a capital charge and took such trouble to convince the jury that he was of bad character. When he was asked whether he would call himself an honest man, he answered that perhaps it would be better to call him a semi-honest man; and his grin gave a deep nastiness to the phrase. He was announcing that he would not be good but he would not be bad either; he was presenting them with a problem of confusion and defied them to solve it. He had a deep love of chaos, and he was for the self because it can carry such a load of the stuff. It was his intention to revolt all who have tried to establish order, and
to torment them by declaring that let the ballet be what it may, there would still be cripples who cannot dance and louts that will not, there will be blindness which cannot be cured by exercises, sickness which will not yield to herbal iodine and sickness which resists psychoanalysis, fields which will be barren for all the dung that is spread on them, and souls which refuse the gift of peace from Christianity or any other faith. Hume spoke with the voice of the spirit that denies.

  It seemed odd that a person so strong in dissent should have lived the ordinary existence of which we had been told. He had been an RAF officer who had done well in the war, having won a decoration in the Battle of Britain, and had been invalided out of the service. Since then he had made a living in various ways, some of which were quite ordinary jobs of electrical engineering, and others of which, such as dealing in planes for the Near East, were more unusual and probably dovetailed with more dubious ones. He had had bad luck; he had started a factory in Wales to make plastic switches and it had been destroyed by two fires. He had his gay side and was seen about in night clubs, often with notably good-looking girls. But he was making a good living by acting as a commercial pilot. It was a very ordinary story. What made it extraordinary was that, though everybody who knew him, including his wife, to whom he was a devoted husband, believed it, not one word of it was true.

  There had been some strange circumstance connected with his birth. His mother was a schoolmistress and called herself his aunt, and when he was three he was sent to some sort of institution which he always described as an orphanage, at which he stayed until he was ten. He interpreted this to mean that he was illegitimate and that he had been sent to this institution because his mother hated him and wished to cast him off. But there are reasons for disbelieving that the story was as simple or as sinister. His mother, an intelligent woman, sister of a well-known scientist, was married at the time of his birth, and it is possible that she may have concealed her relationship to him in order that both of them should escape the shadow of some curious calamity; and certainly many women have sent their young children away to boarding school not because they wanted to but because their circumstances prevented them from looking after them at home. In the village where she lived at the time of the trial she was liked and respected, and as in his childhood she took Hume back from his boarding school to make his home with her, and as she makes a later appearance in his story as conferring with somebody who wanted to be his benefactor, it seems unlikely that she behaved badly to him. Apparently the psychoanalysts are right, and the mind of a child cannot stand any prolonged separation from its mother during the first five years. In any case he continually spoke with rage of his mother, and went on and on through the years about her cruelty in leaving him in the orphanage. He once had a long conversation on the subject with Mrs. Stride, the daily help who gave evidence at his trial, and she gravely told him not to wear himself out by making a fuss over it, and said that she had a right to tell him that, because her father had died young and her mother had had to let her go away for a time, and she knew what it was to have that happen to you when you were a child. But you just had to forget it and get on with life.

  He was a clever boy. He won a scholarship that might have taken him through a secondary school and given him a good chance of going to the university; but in a frenzy he rushed out into the world and earned his living as a kitchen boy in various hotels. It is strange that wherever this boy went, who was bitter because he believed his mother had failed to love him, the earth opened and there appeared people who were willing to give him deep and disinterested affection. One winter’s day in 1934, when he was fourteen, he was seen by a motorist walking across a common in the suburbs of London, dragging a heavy suitcase and weeping. The motorist stopped and gave him a lift and asked him what his trouble was. Hume told him that he was running away from a job as a houseboy in a hotel where they had ill-treated him, and was going to the docks to find a ship that would take him. The motorist, who was a builder, offered him a job in his own business, bought him a suit of clothes, and got one of his own foremen to take the boy in as a lodger. This was amazing good luck, for the foreman’s wife, an elderly woman named Mary Clare, immediately became his loving and beloved mother.

  There began what should have been a happy life for him. By day he learned with some aptitude the craft of electrician; and in the evening he sat with his new mother in the kitchen and enchanted her and was enchanted by her. For a time he became a Communist and had a contented time planning revolution, but politics had hardly any chance with him because of his obsession with planes. When he was working on the wiring of a new house they could always tell where he had been, because he had scribbled drawings of planes on the plastered walls. It was this passion for planes which made him leave that business and take a job in an aircraft factory, and later another one in a Metal Engraving Company which had some connection with aeronautics. At the same time he joined the RAF Volunteer Reserve, and when war came he enlisted in the Royal Air Force.

  Very soon he had a serious accident when flying. Probably he cared too much about it. Shortly afterwards he had an attack of cerebro-spinal meningitis, and he was declared unfit for flying duty and put on the ground staff. Eighteen months after he had volunteered he was declared unfit for any sort of duty in the RAF and was invalided out. Then he took a job as one of the spotters who sat on the roofs of factories and offices and gave warning when a German plane was actually in the neighbourhood, so that the workers need not break off and go down to the shelter when the sirens sounded, which might announce the arrival of a plane anywhere within a hundred miles. At the same time he was trying to get back into the RAF through other avenues, and once got a call to an Aviation Selection Board, but was turned down. It happened about this time that Mary Clare, who had again given him a home, took in her own daughter and her husband, who were homeless owing to the war, and the girl had a baby. Hume became bitterly jealous and complained that Mrs. Clare gave the baby too much of her attention and that it cried so much that he got pains in his head. He became such a plague that she was forced to ask him to leave the house.

  Shortly afterwards he revisited his benefactor, who had picked him up on the common six years before. He was in sergeant-pilot’s uniform and told a story of having played a gallant part in the Battle of Britain. He gave his benefactor and some of the workmen souvenirs, parts of planes he had shot down and a German machine gun. Later he turned up again in officer’s uniform, wearing the ribbon of the Distinguished Flying Medal; and in this rig-out he went to the Metal Engraving Company works, where the firm gave him a substantial cheque in appreciation of what he had done for the country. Then his benefactor received a visit from the police, who told him that Hume had been using his name in the town to recommend himself to people on whom he played the confidence trick; and shortly afterwards he was arrested for masquerading as an RAF officer. He had for some time been carrying on a peculiar fraud, which required great talent and resourcefulness. After Mrs. Clare had asked him to go he had lodged with an ex-officer of the RAF, and had bought his uniform from him and had borrowed an RAF identity card. Thereafter he had travelled from one airfield to another all over the country, living in the messes, getting pilots to take him up for flights, and finally cashing worthless cheques and going on his way to another airfield. He even consulted an RAF medical officer and got him to certify him as unfit for duty, so that he had a certificate to convince any military policeman or anybody else who questioned him that he was on sick leave.

  So ingenious was this plan of campaign that the police at first thought that Hume must be a spy. But they found out that the story was a simple one of imposture, and he was bound over to come up for judgment after being kept in prison for some time under medical treatment. While he was jailed he wrote to Mrs. Clare, who sent him sweets and food. But when he came out he did not go to see her. He cut himself off from his second chance of a contented home life because it was more important to him that he should be able to g
o on pretending to be a pilot. His marriage was a supreme episode in that impersonation; and there are glimpses of other delights. One summer he appeared at Torquay, the best of the south coast seaside resorts, with an American accent and a large American automobile, saying that he was a Pan-American Airways pilot. He became very popular, and when there was a town carnival he was asked to drive the carnival queen in the procession, which he did, bringing out a scarlet and gold uniform for the occasion. He gave the right impression of being very good-humoured about doing something which he could not, of course, really like doing.

  It is an obvious enough story. He suffered from the neurotic’s incapacity for love and could not compensate for that lack by exercising power, so pretended to be powerful. But it was much more than that. The idea of flight had had some treatment in his mind which made it tremendous. When Mr. Humphreys, listing his lies, asked him whether it were not true that he had pretended to be a pilot though he had failed his tests, he was convulsed with grief and fury as he shouted back that he had not failed his tests, he had never taken them, he was not allowed to take them, because he had concussion. “You have no right to say I failed,” he cried, as if Mr. Humphreys were in some magic way killing him by using those words. He too had his religion, he could not bear to have it violated, he was a fervent worshipper. That was to be seen in his apartment, which was a temple of flight. The upper parts of all the walls were obsessionally covered with photographs of planes, of aviators, of air battles, with parts of planes, with cartoons about flyers. Many boys and girls are infatuated with flying, but their rooms are not quite like these, though the fetishes are the same. In his apartment there was a wall on the staircase to the upper floor which took the light. On this wall there were arranged such pictures and such plane parts, and a medal. They were arranged in a pattern like the outline of a great bird with wings. This was not planned; it was an achievement of the daemon within Hume, who had ideas about flight beyond the sphere of aeronautics, who allowed, indeed, some pictures on his walls which were neither of planes nor aviators, which were of birds with strong wings, wild swans, wild geese, creatures of dazzling plumage, cleaving air so high and pure that it is not air at all. Hume had mistaken the nature of his spirit. This was not denial, it was affirmation.