Chapter XXX
I suppose the feelings of a human being awaiting extinction on a near date fixed by the law must vary according to temperament. In this, as in most things, ignorance has its advantages. A chaplain working on a mind incapable of the intellectual effort of scepticism might send a criminal to the scaffold with a distinct feeling that in spite of its other disadvantages, murder plus hanging plus repentance was a short cut to eternal bliss—a view of the question which would no doubt shock the reverend gentleman who had inadvertently been a most effective advocate of murder.
Capital punishment is, of course, a profoundly unphilosophical thing. Only a very ill-informed person would uphold it as a deterrent, and if not a deterrent its only excuse is the selfish one of putting someone out of the way whom it cannot control without expense and trouble. This principle, however, is a very awkward one, and would, stated in its crudest form, astonish some people who mechanically support it.
As soon as I was back—I cannot say comfortably back—in prison, and in the condemned cell, I made up my mind to concentrate myself on a human document which should be a record of my career—a document to be written with as little display of feeling as possible, a statement of facts with well-bred calm and restraint.
I knew, of course, that it must be incomplete. No one has ever told the truth about himself. I, for one, dislike the yawning gaps in the confessions of Rousseau. Either a man’s confessions should have something in them which Rousseau’s have not, or they are not very much worth confessing. A few obvious sexual trivialities are not of very great interest when all human beings guess what has been kept back. Dr. Johnson, when told that the unfortunate Dr. Dodd was devoting his last days to literary work, said: ‘Depend upon it, when a man knows he is going to be hanged in a few days, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.’ I found this to be true. The learned doctor’s point is subtle, and he no doubt was surprised that the concentration was not entirely on that unpleasant event daily coming nearer. Such was my difficulty. I had my human document to finish before a certain date, and that date interfered very largely with my concentration of mind. It had a way of dancing on to the page while I was writing, and of floating, detached and apparent, before my eyes in the growing dusk.
My life began to grow more and more ghostly. My nerves suffered considerably, although I endeavoured as far as possible to conceal the fact from the two sordid figures who kept watch over me. I could not help thinking of what a torture this fortnight or three weeks would have been to anyone afflicted with a terror of death. Personally, I felt the situation more as an offence against good taste than as an offence against humanity. Let anyone reflect what it must mean to be watched morning, noon, and night till the end comes, never to have one moment for solitary reflection or sorrow, not to be able to render to the soul the relief of despairing abandonment; to have the slightest weakness witnessed by careful official eyes, staring with a weird fascination through the long day which is all too short; to feel, in addition, the horror of being caged and held like a wild beast in a trap till the time comes to be led out to die. As I say, I am a singular character, and these things were rather an irritation than an agony. But I wonder that it does not drive the ordinary criminal mad. The man who has slain his wife in a moment of insane jealousy—which is, after all, viewed logically, an evidence of his love, a quality which might still have been turned to good account—is tortured and killed. It is a proceeding which reason condemns as mere barbaric vengeance. Not, as I was saying, that I suffered these horrors. My view of life was too objective for that. True, I had been given a body with which to express myself, and I had done my best for that body, but when that body was condemned to extinction I was able, as it were, to remove myself from it, and view men and their ways from a distance.
The chaplain called on me, sometimes three times a day, and I enjoyed his conversation very much. I led him from the crude vulgarities of attempted conversion to discussions on minute questions of Christian culture. I also dissected my sensations for his benefit. I told him that the reality that the end was so near now and then flashed upon me like an electric shock, and that this sensation was exceedingly uncomfortable, which he said he could well believe. I was not, I told him, afflicted with any very great terror of the mere function itself. This he thought extraordinary, as I was an agnostic. I told him that I thought it highly probable there was a hereafter, but that it was quite possible that it might be so different from anything we could imagine as to confuse our view of ethics, and that I might awake to find myself greeted as a saint. He was a little shocked, and took the joke as an admission of guilt, a point in which I was obliged to correct him.
I think he was surprised when I involved him in a long discussion on the moral aspect of capital punishment. Perhaps he went away and said I was callous. This is the orthodox designation of a man who has strength of mind or courage enough to meet a humanly-devised punishment with indifference. The same quality used in a different field will earn a reputation for valour. The dear chaplain was true to his cloth, and evidently viewed the crime of an English peer with something more of indulgence than he would have felt for the guilt of a member of the lower classes. Indeed, his reiterations of ‘my lord’ in his religious discussions were so constant as to confuse me with regard to the particular individual he was addressing.
I received a letter from Esther Lane in cryptic language which I could not understand at the time, but which was to be fully revealed afterwards.
I do not care to dwell upon the farewell interviews with my wife. They were curiously and unexpectedly unpleasant. The Dowager Lady Gascoyne—I allude, of course, to the widow of my benefactor—who, strangely enough, had never had the least doubt of my innocence, also came to see me. I think that in a sense the farewell that cost me most was that from Grahame Hallward, the unobtrusive and consistent friend. I do not think that the hopeless agony in his face could have been more terrible had he been related to me by the nearest of blood ties. He assured me that he would devote the rest of his life to proving my innocence. Thus is the tragic often unconsciously allied to the ridiculous.
My mind was fully occupied. The chaplain’s visits and those of people who wished to say farewell, in addition to a great deal of time spent with my lawyer, with whom I had to make many arrangements, took up all the spare moments I did not devote to these memoirs. I should have liked to know whether my child was a boy, although in either case it would make no difference to the succession.
I was astonished to learn that there had been an extraordinary revulsion of feeling in my favour. I thought that the facts were really too plain to admit of an outburst of sentimentalism. I suppose the idea of a peer dying a sordid death shocked the British public as much as the idea of slaying a woman gently born had done some short time before. Hanging was good enough for the ignorant and poverty-stricken. The snobbery of the public is easier appealed to than its humanity.
The usual petition which my lawyer had prepared was signed by all sorts of unexpected people, even by some of those who had voted for my guilt.
The Home Secretary could not, however, find any loophole for interfering, and the Governor informed me of the date fixed, in a curious phraseology which was no doubt meant to modify facts.
I was getting a little feverish, as was only natural. I found it necessary to use some effort to brace myself up for the final ordeal. Thoughts of Sibella haunted me, and played upon my memory like the love motive on the lover’s brain in Berlioz’s Scarlet Symphony. She was the allure beckoning my thoughts back to life, and it was a strange confirmation of what I had always felt—viz., that she was my strongest human magnet. I had not heard from her since the day of my arrest, but two days before the end I received a letter. It gave me infinite pleasure, and I knew it was the one thing I had been waiting for. She did not know, she wrote, how she had managed in her agony to conceal the truth from Lionel, but so far he had suspected nothing; indeed, he was working night and day for me.
I became quite sentimental over this letter. My thoughts wandered back to the schoolroom in the Hallwards’ house on Clapham Common. I saw Sibella as a little school-girl with a host of boy admirers. I remembered her as she was that afternoon we came home from football and all had tea together. I remembered the kisses, beautiful and perfumed as roses, which we had exchanged as children, and I remembered the burning kiss, unexpected by both of us, exchanged that Sunday evening when Grahame left us alone. These things returned to me with the dull pain of melodies, associated with wild moments of joy, heard again in moments of desolation, phantoms of music wailing past in the haunted air.
Apart from the ineradicable desire to live, which is the chief vice of human beings, I was not very anxious for my friends to obtain a reprieve. In default of an absolute pardon, my reason taught me that it would be better for them to fail. I did not relish the idea of wearing out my life in chains. Thus, when the eve of the fatal day arrived, I experienced a certain relief.
I retired to rest with an indifference which I saw impressed the only audience I had left. I slept peacefully for several hours, but towards morning I experienced a curious sensation of semi-giddiness, as if I were being rocked in mid-air. The sensation grew more and more rapid, till, suddenly, it seemed as if I were hurtling through space at a terrific speed, as if worlds, stars, and atmosphere were revolving round me at a rate indescribable to human intelligence.
It was as if I were in the engine-room of the universe, and as if the ceaseless terror of its secrets whirled me hither and thither, like a grain of sand. I was in the unlimited, unable to grasp time or space. Then, by degrees, there came a calm; I lay still: and, almost unconscious of having passed out of the sleeping state, I was awake, with my eyes fixed on the Governor.
The cell was warm with sunlight, and it struck me at the time that this was most unsuitable. As, half awake, I looked at the Governor, a somewhat humorous idea struck me. I thought I was late for the ceremony, and that he had come to bid me make haste. I sprang up with a start, and I may have turned a little pale. It was excusable, I think. I then saw that the room was full of people, and not the people whom I had expected to see. The Governor seized my hand, and Grahame Hallward sprang forward and grasped the other.
“Lord Gascoyne, your innocence has been established beyond question. The real culprit has confessed.”
It sounded like a speech out of a melodrama. Luckily, I retained my self-possession sufficiently to say something expressive of my thanks to Providence. I think it met the occasion.
Who the real culprit could be I failed to understand.
“I have given instructions,” said the Governor, “for you to be taken to a comfortable room till the actual order for your release arrives.”
Then I recollected my manuscript on the table. No one had seen it but myself, but if it were noticed it would be awkward.
It was a terrible moment. I expected the Governor as I picked it up to say: “Anything written in a prison becomes the property of the Crown,” but I was allowed to walk off with it.
Escorted by a congratulatory group, I was taken to a room which was quite luxurious. Grahame Hallward and myself breakfasted together.
Then he told me all about it.
“You remember the governess at Hammerton Castle?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Well, it is very sad for Lady Gascoyne, but it appears that Lord Gascoyne had made love to her, that she was about to become a mother, and that she poisoned his tea that evening as she had already poisoned the wine. The servants remember now that she had been in the dining-room. She intended at the time to kill herself as well, but she had not the courage. Last night, however, she did so, having written to your wife and to the Home Secretary, your lawyer, and others, so as to make sure of the news arriving in time.”
I looked at him, striving to hide the sheer horror which I felt for the first time in my life.
I was not surprised at the sacrifice, for it was the sort of gigantic thing that a nature like Esther’s would have conceived and carried out. Nevertheless, the news filled me with a profound gloom.
It was better, however, to be sitting there finishing my coffee and smoking a cigarette than meandering out on to the unknown.
“Sibella has been awfully ill, Israel.”
“Did people think me guilty?” I asked.
He avoided my question, and said:
“The revulsion of feeling has been tremendous. Everybody will be delighted.”
And so it turned out. People had not at all liked the idea of a real, live lord becoming an unreal, dead lord by such means. The Home Secretary sent the order for my release the same afternoon. The dead Lord Gascoyne became a monster of iniquity, and I was congratulated by everyone on the dénouement.
But to this day, there is a sadness in my wife’s manner, and although she tries to hide a shuddering aversion for me when we are alone, it shows itself unexpectedly in trifles. In some way she has grasped the truth. Indeed, she must have done, for there can be no other explanation of her conduct. We have two children, and perhaps there is something pathetic in the amount of moral training she gives them. I am sure there is no need for Hammerton to turn out other than well. I have done the work. He has only to reap the benefit and the reward. The second boy is a gentle little creature, Oriental in his nature, and most devoted to his father, as they both are, but the second boy especially so.
Sibella is still—Sibella.
The End