by Rebecca West
There began the worst part of my parents’ ordeal. Papa had to take Aunt Lily to Holloway Jail, where she saw her sister, to the local police court, where a preliminary charge relating to the purchase of poison was brought, to the inquest, to the local police court again when another and graver charge was preferred, again and again to her solicitors, and in the end to the Old Bailey; and he gave her hours of instruction, the purpose of which was to prepare her for her appearance in the witness-box, and to control the pious enthusiasm with which she was contemplating perjury as the new cross she must bear for Queenie. Meanwhile Mamma had to censor her costume every morning and get her off in time, and then be ready to receive her at the end of the long day, to force her upstairs to take off the cruel clothes of the day, the huge hat, the boned dresses, the corsets, and suggest she tell her story, since she must tell it, in bed, in one of those flannel nightdresses Mamma lent her because Queenie had not let her wear anything but lawn at the Laurels, in case the servants thought her common. Moreover, my parents were perpetually tormented by compunction lest by obeying their moral sense and befriending an unfortunate family they had exposed their children to experiences unsuitable for their years. Perhaps to be mistaken is a constant human condition; for I cannot imagine parents in that situation who would not feel a like sense of guilt; but I am sure that their self-reproach was quite unjustified. It would perhaps have been different if we had not read Shakespeare from our earliest years, but as it was, though we felt horror and pity, we also felt that this was the last act, and thank goodness, we were minor characters. Besides, we always thought that everything in the end was going to be all right.
Really, it worked out far better than could have been supposed. One evening I was sent up to Aunt Lily’s room after supper with a fresh hot-water bottle, and she detained me by saying, “Rose, I’d like to tell you something. I feel you’ll understand, you’re such an old-fashioned kiddy.” This, in her language, meant that I was old beyond my years. “It’s something you might like to remember when you’re grown up and got kiddies of your own. Your Papa is doing much more for me than he knows. The coppers wouldn’t be half so nice to me if he wasn’t there. They’re only nice because he’s a gentleman. You can’t tell me that coppers are like that all the time. Oh, they’re nice, on and off. But I once worked in a place that backed on a police station and I lived in, and you could hear everything. Why, they used their belts in the cells if anybody made trouble, particularly on Saturday night. Mind you, you couldn’t blame them, most of the people they had to do with were under the influence, and there isn’t anything more tiresome than people who are under the influence. But, take it from me, I wouldn’t be getting ‘Yes, madam,’ ‘This way, madam,’ and ‘If you please, madam,’ and never a push, and me on the wrong side this time, if it wasn’t for your dear Papa. But I don’t think he has the slightest idea. I don’t think either your Papa or Mamma have the slightest idea about half the things that go on in this wicked world.”
I do not suppose that most parents, even in these days, would actually hope that their little schoolgirl daughters should be told, by one who knows, how policemen belt drunks in their cells on Saturday nights; but I went from the room exalted by a vision. I saw a vast prison such as I had seen in a volume of drawings by Piranesi, and in its innumerable cells innumerable Dogberries were beating innumerable Borachios or better still Launcelot Gobbos, an action which I thought quite pardonable; I had often wondered how it came about that Shakespeare had as much gift for drawing comic characters as my sister Cordelia had for playing the violin. Through the black galleries that pierced this penal mass passed my father and mother, crowned with haloes, robed in light, on their way to succour more worthy prisoners than these, whom I had not time to invent, opening dungeon doors with a touch, annulling fetters with a glance, because they were innocent. I was, in fact, inspired to reach the heights of filial piety.
There were a few occasions when Aunt Lily was weak and pitiful; but they were not so trying as those on which she felt herself strong and gloried in her strength. Then her addiction to linguistic fantasy became more than we could bear. Nothing was called by its own name. Money was the ready, to lack it was to be hearts-of-oak, potatoes were murphies, a slice of pork was a cut from the jolly old city of York, when she put anything in her pocket it went into her sky-rocket. Like Japanese poetry, her conversation required to be carefully translated into the same language in which it was composed. But it differed from Japanese poetry in being far from brief. Each day she set her listeners a task equal to the translation of a long novel, which they could not refuse, because her darting glances sought for signs of inattention, which she modestly misread as signs of cold disapproval. She was always offering to leave us, and once she did. A letter came for her which was not the one she awaited, but which nevertheless gave her great pleasure, for it was from a friend she had known long ago, asking, just as if they had met last week, if there was anything she could do for her. “Why, it’s years and years and years since we met, we were just girls,” said Aunt Lily, quite absurdly, for she was not old, she was in her early thirties. “We both worked together in the same place, it was a nice place, I never would have left it, but they weren’t fair to Queenie, and she showed spirit, and they turned nasty, and we had to leave. But I’ve always been sorry, this girl and me were thick as thieves, always giggling together, and everybody made jokes about us, because she was Milly, and I was Lily. Milly and Lily, you see. Oh,” she said ecstatically, “there’s nothing like a friend.” She felt about for a tag about friendship, but was not quite successful. “They say a man’s best friend is his dog,” was all she could do, “but who wouldn’t rather just have a friend?” Now Milly was married to a man who had a nice little pub of his own down on the river and she begged Lily to come and stay with her; and so Lily did, announcing she had gone for four days. There began a delicious period when we all hardly spoke and practised for hours and felt as if we were on holiday.
But Aunt Lily was back in three days, not failing to mention a bad penny, though Milly had been as kind as kind, because her dreadful business was not done, and she could not bear to think that a policeman might come to the door and speak of some new trap that had opened before Queenie, and she would not be there to save her sister, supported by the celestial cunning of both Papa and Mamma, and relying by day on Papa’s spectral aristocracy, the ghost of privilege, and by night on Mamma’s fierce tenderness. My parents made a little festivity of her return and reassumed their burden. But it would be untruthful to represent this as simply self-sacrifice on their part. I spoke in that sense to Mamma, saying, “How good you are,” and she answered impatiently, “Nonsense, Aunt Lily is such an honest creature that, with all the tiresomeness, it is refreshing to be with her. Oh, it is more than that. I deeply respect her. She is so honest.”
“So honest?” I said. “But isn’t Papa telling her all the time she mustn’t commit perjury to save her sister?”
“Yes, indeed,” said Mamma. “And to everybody she meets she says that she can’t believe how the police could be silly enough to think that Queenie would lift a finger against Harry, as there never was a cross word between them during the whole of their married life, and she ought to know, seeing she lived with them from the honeymoon. But I hope you think no worse of her for that. It is very difficult, my dear, you must try to understand. It is always disgraceful for you to tell a lie, but if other people tell lies there is often a very good reason for it, and you must just note that they are lying and pass on.”
“But how can that be?” I asked. “Why isn’t it disgraceful for them to tell lies, if it is disgraceful for me to tell lies?”
“Well, it is disgraceful for them to tell lies, they should tell themselves that and not do it, but all the same if they do tell lies you should not think it disgraceful, for you would probably be wrong.”
“But that is nonsense, Mamma,” I protested. “Either it is disgraceful or it is not!”
“No, no,” said Mamma, “you are thinking of it as if it were arithmetic. And do not raise your voice. You shriek too often. Of course dear Aunt Lily is not particular about the truth, and we wish she was more so. But whatever she says to strangers she never pretends to Papa and to me that her sister is not guilty. That must be a great sacrifice for her to make.”
“Why does she do that?” I asked. “Is it because she feels she cannot lie to people who have taken her in to live with them?”
Mamma hesitated. “No. I think she might not feel that. I only concede that I am not sure she would feel that because she feels something far better. She wants there to be one place in the world where she can admit what Queenie is and yet say she loves her.”
“But what good does that do to you and Papa?” I said. I was not so stupid that I had no glimmering of the answer, but I was very curious about any emotion or opinion that my father and mother held in common.
“Why, it means she loves Queenie quite honestly,” said Mamma. “There is no element of delusion about it. And that is a good thing to think of. Besides,” she said, “Aunt Lily is very brave. She never expresses any anxiety about her future, but she has nothing. They gave her no salary at the Laurels, only a little pocket-money, which I suppose was natural enough, since they expected to give her a home for the rest of her life. But now she has only a few pounds in the savings bank and that jewellery. It must be terrible, to have nothing, absolutely nothing behind one.”
She spoke with a solemnity which puzzled me. I had rather thought that was our own situation and that we had got used to it.
I must admit that as Queenie’s trial drew nearer we were subject to experiences which bore hard on our youth. We began to be very conscious of Queenie herself. We saw her stolid and still as a chessman taken off the board, a black queen, compressed in a cell too small for the violent feeling which was like a huge cube encasing her. It seemed certain she was to be taken by a smaller space than her cell. We had heard Papa say to Mamma when he had brought Aunt Lily home from the first hearing of the worse charge at the police court that there could be no acquittal, because the story George the chauffeur had to tell left not a loophole open. The distress this opinion caused us was not on Queenie’s account, for she seemed to us simply a chessman, a black queen encased in an evil mist itself encased in a small cell, something strayed out of those disagreeable tales by the brothers Grimm which when we were small we had twice ejected from our nursery, with cries that we were being given corrupt literature unsuitable for children, because Aunt Theodora had twice given them to us as Christmas presents. Our feeling of Queenie’s unreality had been increasing since we learned, I do not know exactly how, for we were not reading the newspapers, that the cause of the Phillips tragedy was Queenie’s desire to run away from her husband with Mr. Mason, a clerk in the firm of house-agents which handled all Cousin Ralph’s property in the district, including our house. It seemed to us odd that anybody should be shocked because Queenie had intended to desert her family; we could not imagine anything that would have been nicer for Nancy. But we were astonished by the selection of Mr. Mason, whom we knew quite well, as Mamma often took us with her when, each time glowing with triumph, and long after quarter-day, she went to pay the rent. He was a tall and slender young man with the fresh complexion of a child and a small moustache, whom we called the Gillyflower, and we could not understand it at all. Mary reminded us that some medieval queens and ladies who lived in castles seemed to have got very fond of their pages, who always sounded just like girls. But Queenie did not fit into the age of chivalry, and we saw her rather as a witch of the kind that longs for strawberries in wintertime, or the central feather from the tail of the mother starling in the third nest in the eaves of the porch of the Grand Vizier’s palace, and like a witch, we supposed, she would break into flames and disappear. Also in the backs of our minds, as if we had read it in a newspaper which had not yet appeared, we knew that the worst was not going to happen to Queenie. It was going, we thought, to be all right. But we could not be sure, and in any case something would happen to Queenie, and Aunt Lily would grieve, and we grieved for her.
Mamma wanted to send us to Kate’s mother during the trial, but we would not go. We told her that Richard Quin would be better out of the way, but that we must stay, because we could help her. We thought that when Queenie had been sentenced Aunt Lily would be brought back from the court very ill, and that there would be a lot of running about to the doctor and the chemist, and maybe Mamma would have to sit up with Aunt Lily at night, and would have to be allowed to sleep by day. Also we were too young to have any fear of spectacular events. In the end we bribed Mamma to let us stay by pointing out that these were the Easter holidays, and to go to Kate’s mother would be to leave our pianos at a time when we would play all day. This weakness on the part of my mother did us no harm at all. For though we let ourselves in for an unpleasant time, since Aunt Lily did not wait for her sister to be sentenced to pass into hysterical frenzy, we learned that courage has no power to convert its surroundings into a field of fantasy. It had appeared to us that till then, if we said boldly that we would perform a disagreeable feat, a listening Providence would reward us by seeing that the feat became agreeable. Now we knew better.
It had been evident, the very first time Papa brought Aunt Lily back from the Old Bailey, that the trial was not taking the course he had expected. He was silent as if he were reading, as if watching something develop which had not yet disclosed its true nature. And before they started out on the third morning he told Mamma that he thought the trial would end the following morning, and added, “Do you know, I think this business is not going to finish as we thought it would.”
Mamma gaped. “But she is guilty?”
“Yes, but there is something that can be done. That ought to be done,” he added, his face looking as resolute as a cat’s.
That afternoon Mamma was giving me my lesson, when we heard a noise in the hall. I stopped playing and Mamma stood up, singing the phrase which I had failed to finish. We found the front door held open by Kate, and a cab at the gate, and Papa lifting Aunt Lily out of it. He carried her along the path and up the steps, looking himself so thin and fevered that the cabby walked alongside them, ready to catch her in case poor Papa dropped her. Once in the hall, Papa handed her, like a bundle of clothes, to tall Kate, while he fumbled in his pockets for money to give the cabby. With habitual anguish I thought he might find none, but he had enough. Kate gently lowered Aunt Lily to the ground; we all knew that Aunt Lily could perfectly well have walked, and was obeying some self-made convention which ordained it improper for a woman who had just heard her sister sentenced to death at the Old Bailey to have perfect control over her limbs. But there was such real grief on her face that we let her have her way, and stood back while she wailed with sugary falsity, “My darling Queenie! My angel Queenie!” Immediately she passed to more sincere exclamations, and I learned for the first time that it is impossible to predict accurately an event of any magnitude. I had thought she would utter classical lamentations, almost wordless wails of pure grief, over the approaching doom of her sister. But sharper cries, of an argumentative sort, issued from her lips.
“They’re going to hang Queenie. And it isn’t fair. That horrible old man got them to find her guilty. And I tell you it isn’t fair. He went on nohow.”
“Come and sit down, my dear,” said Mamma.
“Lemme tell you,” said Aunt Lily, “he wasn’t a judge. I don’t know how he had the nerve to call himself a judge. I know what a judge ought to be, he sits up there big and calm and says what’s what to the highest in the land, not altogether of course, but more or less. This dirty old man took sides from the first, oh, I kept my mind open at first, because your dear husband has always been telling me how fair it all would be, but all the time that old man’s been falling off the bench to shut up witnesses who could say a word for Queenie. He should have been down in the court with that heartless beast what was
prosecuting her. And then this summing-up, he went for her like a wildcat. But nothing so decent.”
“Come, dear,” said Mamma.
“No, I will have my say,” said Aunt Lily. “Nothing so decent. Oh, the old brute. I know his sort. He’ll get caught yet. In Hyde Park, I shouldn’t wonder.” She was passing the hall table as she spoke, and she looked down on the letters. “No letter for me?” she asked. “Of course there isn’t. Why should I ask? There would have been one long ago if there was to be one at all. But you’d think that when a person had pretended to be a friend, just a friend I grant you, no more but a friend, they’d write now. But not a line, and it all fits in. Pretending to be a friend, and this old man pretending to be a judge when what he was you saw as soon as he looked at poor Queenie. My feet hurt, they’ve swelled up like balloons, I wore my oldest shoes, but it hasn’t made no difference.”
“Go upstairs to bed, my dear,” said Mamma.
“I don’t want to go to bed, not laying down straight and waiting for the dark, oh, poor Queenie,” said Aunt Lily, “but it’s that beast of a judge, let me go and sit down by the fire and have a cup of tea.”
Shaking her clenched fists, she passed into the sitting room, and Papa said in an undertone to Mamma, “What she is saying is quite sensible. So sensible that I think we will be able to get her sister reprieved.”