The Council of Justice Read online

  ‘Nothing,’ she said quickly, ‘only I am—I cannot understand—you are different—’

  ‘From what you expected.’ She bent her head. ‘You expected me to air a triumph. To place myself in defence?’ She nodded again.

  ‘No, no,’ he went on, ‘that is finished. I do not pursue a victory—I am satisfied that the power of your friends is shattered. I dissociate you from the humiliation of their defeat.’

  ‘I am no better nor worse than they,’ she said defiantly.

  ‘You will be better when the madness passes,’ he said gravely, ‘when you realize that your young life was not meant for the dreadful sacrifice of anarchy.’

  He leant over and took her listless hand and held it between his palms.

  ‘Child, you must leave this work,’ he said softly. ‘Forget the nightmare of your past—put it out of your mind so that you will come to believe that the Red Hundred never existed.’

  She did not draw away her hand, nor did she attempt to check the tears that came to her eyes. Something had entered her soul—an influence that was beyond all description or definition. A wonderful element that had dissolved the thing of granite and steel that she had fondly thought was her heart and left her weak and shaking in the process.

  ‘Maria, if you ever knew a mother’s love’—how soft his voice was—‘think of that: have you ever realized what your tiny life was to her—how she planned and thought and suffered for you—and to what end? That the hands she kissed should be set against men’s lives! Did she pray to God that He might keep you strong in health and pure in soul—only that His gifts should prove a curse to His beautiful world?’

  With the tenderness of a father, he drew her to him, till she was on her knees before him and her weeping face was pressed closely against him.

  His strong arms were about her, and his hand smoothed her hair.

  ‘I am a wicked woman,’ she sobbed, ‘a wicked, wicked woman.’

  ‘Hush,’ he said sadly. ‘Do not let us take our conception of wickedness from our deeds, but from our intentions, however mistaken, however much they traverse the written law.’

  But her sobbing grew wilder, and she clutched him as though in fear that he would leave her.

  He talked to her as though she were a frightened child, chiding her, laughing at her in gentle raillery, and she grew calmer and presently lifted her stained face to his.

  ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘I—I—oh, I cannot, I cannot say it.’ And she buried her face on her breast.

  Then, with an effort, she raised her head again.

  ‘If I asked you—if I begged you to do something for me—would you?’

  He looked into her eyes, smiling.

  ‘You have done many things—you have killed—yes—yes, let me say it—I know I am hurting you, but let me finish.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said simply, ‘I have killed.’

  ‘Have you—pitied as you killed?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Yet you would,’ she went on, and her distress moved him, ‘you would if you thought that you could kill a body and save a soul.’

  He shook his head again.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ she whispered and tried to speak. Twice she attempted to frame the words, and twice she failed. Then she pushed herself slowly backward with her hands at his chest and crouched before him with parted lips and heaving bosom.

  ‘Kill me,’ she breathed, ‘for I have betrayed you to the police.’

  Still he made no sign, sitting there all huddled in the big chair, as though every muscle of his body had relaxed.

  ‘Do you hear?’ she cried fiercely. ‘I have betrayed you because—I think—I love you—but I—I did not know it—I did not know it! I hated you so that I pitied you—and always I thought of you!’

  She knew by the look of pain in his eyes what her words had cost him.

  Somehow she divined that the betrayal hurt least.

  ‘I have never said it to myself,’ she whispered; ‘I have never thought it in my most secret thoughts—yet it was there, there all the time, waiting for expression—and I am happier, though you die, and though every hour of my life be a lifetime of pain, I am happier that I have said it, happier than I thought I could ever be.

  ‘I have wondered why I remembered you, and why I thought of you, and why you came into my every dream. I thought it was because I hated you, because I wanted to kill you and to hold you at my mercy—but I know now, I know now.’

  She rocked from side to side, clasping her hands in the intensity of her passion.

  ‘You do not speak?’ she cried. ‘Do you not understand, beloved? I have handed you over to the police because—O God! Because I love you! It must be that I do!’

  He leant forward and held out his hands, and she came to him, half swooning.

  ‘Marie, child,’ he murmured, and she saw how pale he was, ‘we are strangely placed, you and I to talk of love. You must forget this, little girl; let this be the waking point of your bad dream; go forth into the new life—into a life where flowers are, and birds sing, and where rest and peace is.’

  She had no thought now, save for his danger.

  ‘They are below,’ she moaned. ‘I brought them here—I guided them.’

  He smiled into her face.

  ‘I knew,’ he said.

  She looked at him incredulously.

  ‘You knew,’ she said slowly.

  ‘Yes—when you came’—he pointed to the heap of burnt papers in the grate—‘I knew.’

  He walked to the window and looked out. What he saw satisfied him.

  He came back to where she still crouched on the floor and lifted her to her feet.

  She stood unsteadily, but his arm supported her. He was listening; he heard the door open below.

  ‘You must not think of me,’ he said again.

  She shook her head helplessly, and her lips quivered.

  ‘God bless you and help you,’ he said reverently and kissed her.

  Then he turned to meet Falmouth.

  ‘George Manfred,’ said the officer and looked at the girl in perplexity.

  ‘That is my name,’ said Manfred quietly. ‘You are Inspector Falmouth.’

  ‘Superintendent,’ corrected the other.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Manfred.

  ‘I shall take you into custody,’ said Falmouth, ‘on suspicion of being a member of an organization known as the Four Just Men, and accordingly concerned in the following crimes—’

  ‘I will excuse you the recital,’ said Manfred pleasantly and held out his hands. For the first time in his life, he felt the cold contact of steel at his wrists.

  The man who snapped the handcuffs on was nervous and bungled, and Manfred, after an interested glance at the gyves, lifted his hands.

  ‘This is not quite fastened,’ he said.

  Then, as they closed round him, he half turned toward the girl and smiled.

  ‘Who knows how bright are the days in store for us both?’ he said softly.

  Then they took him away.

  CHAPTER XII.

  In Wandsworth Gaol

  CHARLES GARRETT, ADMIRABLE JOURNALIST, had written the last line of a humorous description of a local concert at which a cabinet minister had sung pathetic ballads. Charles wrote with difficulty, for the situation had been of itself so funny that extracting its hidden humours was a more than ordinarily heartbreaking thing. But he had finished, and the thick batch of copy lay on the chief subeditor’s desk—Charles wrote on an average six words to a folio, and a half a column story from his pen bulked like a three-volume novel.

  Charles stopped to threaten an office boy who had misdirected a letter, strolled into various quiet offices to ‘see who was there’, and, with his raincoat on his arm and his stick in his hand, stopped at the end of his wanderings before the chattering tape machine. He looked through the glass box that shielded the mechanism and was interested in a message from Tehran in the course of transmission.

  ‘�
��at early date. Grand Vizier has informed Exchange Correspondent that the construction of line will be pushed forward …’

  The tape stopped its stuttering and buzzed excitedly, then came a succession of quick jerks that cleared away the uncompleted message.

  Then ‘…the leader of the Four Just Men was arrested in London tonight,’ said the tape, and Charles broke for the editor’s room.

  He flung open the door without ceremony and repeated the story the little machine had told.

  The grey chief received the news quietly, and the orders he gave in the next five minutes inconvenienced some twenty or thirty unoffending people.

  The construction of the ‘story’ of the Four Just Men began at the lower rung of the intellectual ladder.

  ‘You boy! Get half a dozen taxicabs here quick … Poynter, ’phone the reporters in … get the Lambs Club on the ’phone and see if O’Mahony or any other of our bright youths are there … There are five columns about the Four Just Men standing in the gallery, get it pulled up, Mr. Short … pictures—h’m … yet wire Massonni to get down to the police station and see if he can find a policeman who’ll give him material for a sketch … Off you go, Charles, and get the story.’

  There was no flurry, no rush; it was for all the world like the scene on a modern battleship when ‘clear lower deck for action’ had sounded. Two hours to get the story into the paper was ample, and there was no need for the whip.

  Later, with the remorseless hands of the clock moving on, taxi after taxi flew up to the great newspaper office, discharging alert young men who literally leapt into the building. Later, with waiting operators sitting tensely before the keyboards of the linotypes, came Charles Garrett doing notable things with a stump of pencil and a ream of thin copy paper.

  It was the Megaphone that shone splendidly amid its journalistic fellows, with pages—I quote the envenomed opinion of the news editor of the Mercury—that ‘shouted like the checks on a bookmaker’s waistcoat’.

  It was the Megaphone that fed the fires of public interest and was mainly responsible for the huge crowds that gathered outside Greenwich Police Court and overflowed in dense masses to the foot of Blackheath Hill, while Manfred underwent his preliminary inquiries.

  ‘George Manfred, aged 39, of no occupation, residing at Hill Crest Lodge, St John’s.’ In this prosaic manner, he was introduced to the world.

  He made a striking figure in the steel-railed dock. A chair was placed for him, and he was guarded as few prisoners had been guarded. A special cell had been prepared for his reception, and departing from established custom, extra warders were detailed to watch him. Falmouth took no risks.

  The charge that had been framed had to do with no well-known case. Many years before, one Samuel Lipski, a notorious East End sweater, had been found dead with the stereotyped announcement that he had fallen to the justice of the Four. Upon this the Treasury founded its case for the prosecution—a case that had been very thoroughly and convincingly prepared and pigeonholed against such time as arrest should overtake one or the other of the Four Just Men.

  Reading over the thousands of newspaper cuttings dealing with the preliminary examination and trial of Manfred, I am struck with the absence of any startling feature, such as one might expect to find in a great state trial of this description. Summarizing the evidence that was given at the police court, one might arrange the ‘parts’ of the dozen or so commonplace witnesses so that they read:

  A policeman: ‘I found the body.’

  An inspector: ‘I read the label.’

  A doctor: ‘I pronounced him dead.’

  An only man with a slight squint and broken English: ‘This man Lipski, I known him, he were a goot man and make the business wit the head, ker-vick.’

  And the like.

  Manfred refused to plead ‘guilty’ or ‘not guilty’. He spoke only once during the police court proceedings, and then only when the formal question had been put to him.

  ‘I am prepared to abide by the result of my trial,’ he said clearly, ‘and it cannot matter much one way or the other whether I plead “guilty” or “not guilty”.’

  ‘I will enter your plea as “not guilty”,’ said the magistrate.

  Manfred bowed.

  ‘That is at your worship’s discretion,’ he said.

  On the seventh of June, he was formally committed for trial. He had a short interview with Falmouth before he was removed from the police-court cells.

  Falmouth would have found it difficult to analyse his feelings toward this man. He scarcely knew himself whether he was glad or sorry that fate had thrown the redoubtable leader into his hands.

  His attitude to Manfred was that of a subordinate to a superior, and that attitude he would have found hardest to explain.

  When the cell door was opened to admit the detective, Manfred was reading. He rose with a cheery smile to greet his visitor.

  ‘Well, Mr. Falmouth,’ he said lightly, ‘we enter upon the second and more serious act of the drama.’

  ‘I don’t know whether I’m glad or sorry,’ said Falmouth bluntly.

  ‘You ought to be glad,’ said Manfred with his quizzical smile. ‘For you’ve vindicated—’

  ‘Yes, I know all about that,’ said Falmouth dryly, ‘but it’s the other pan I hate.’

  ‘You mean—?’

  Manfred did not complete the question.

  ‘I do—it’s a hanging job, Mr. Manfred, and that is the hateful business after the wonderful work you’ve done for the country.’

  Manfred threw back his head and laughed in unrestrained amusement.

  ‘Oh, it’s nothing to laugh about,’ said the plainspoken detective. ‘You are against a bad proposition—the Home Secretary is a cousin of Ramon’s, and he hates the very name of the Four Just Men.’

  ‘Yet I may laugh,’ said Manfred calmly, ‘for I shall escape.’

  There was no boastfulness in the speech, but a quiet assurance that had the effect of nettling the other.

  ‘Oh, you will, will you?’ he said grimly. ‘Well, we shall see.’

  There was no escape for Manfred in the dozen yards or so between his cell door and the prison van. He was manacled to two warders, and a double line of policemen formed an avenue through which he was marched. Not from the van itself that moved in a solid phalanx of mounted men with drawn swords. Nor from the gloomy portals of Wandsworth Gaol, where silent, uniformed men closed round him and took him to the triple-locked cell.

  Once in the night, as he slept, he was awakened by the sound of the changing guard, and this amused him.

  If one had the space to write, one could compile a whole book concerning Manfred’s life during the weeks he lay in gaol awaiting trial. He had his visitors. Unusual laxity was allowed in this respect. Falmouth hoped to find the other two men. He generously confessed his hope to Manfred.

  ‘You may make your mind easy on that point,’ said Manfred. ‘They will not come.’

  Falmouth believed him.

  ‘If you were an ordinary criminal, Mr. Manfred,’ he said smilingly, ‘I should hint the possibilities of King’s evidence, but I won’t insult you.’

  Manfred’s reply staggered him.

  ‘Of course not,’ he said with an air of innocence; ‘if they were arrested, who on earth would arrange my escape?’

  The Woman of Gratz did not come to see him, and he was glad.

  He had his daily visits from the governor and found him charmingly agreeable. They talked of countries known to both, of people whom each knew equally well, and tacitly avoided forbidden subjects. Only—

  ‘I hear you are going to escape?’ said the governor as he concluded one of these visits. He was a largely built man, sometime Major of Marine Artillery, and he took life seriously. Therefore he did not share Falmouth’s view of the projected escape as being an ill-timed jest.

  ‘Yes,’ replied Manfred.

  ‘From here?’

  Manfred shook his head solemnly.

 
‘The details have not yet been arranged,’ he said with admirable gravity. The governor frowned.

  ‘I don’t believe you’re trying to pull my leg—it’s too devilishly serious a matter to joke about—but it would be an awkward thing for me if you got away.’ He was of the prisoner’s own caste, and he had supreme faith in the word of the man who discussed prison-breaking so lightheartedly.

  ‘That I realize,’ said Manfred with a little show of deference, ‘and I shall accordingly arrange my plans so that the blame shall be equally distributed.’

  The governor, still frowning thoughtfully, left the cell. He came back in a few minutes.

  ‘By the way, Manfred,’ he said, ‘I forgot to tell you that you’ll get a visit from the chaplain. He’s a very decent young fellow, and I know I needn’t ask you to let him down lightly.’

  With this subtle assumption of mutual paganism, he left finally.

  ‘That is a worthy gentleman,’ thought Manfred.

  The chaplain was nervously anxious to secure an opening and sought amid the trivialities that led out of the conventional exchange of greetings a fissure for the insertion of a tactful inquiry.

  Manfred, seeing his embarrassment, gave him the chance and listened respectfully while the young man talked, earnestly, sincerely, manfully.

  ‘N—no,’ said the prisoner after a while, ‘I don’t think, Mr. Summers, that you and I hold very different opinions, if they were all reduced to questions of faith and appreciation of God’s goodness—but I have got to a stage where I shrink from labelling my inmost beliefs with this or that creed or circumscribing the boundless limits of my faith with words. I know you will forgive me and believe that I do not say this from any desire to hurt you, but I have reached, too, a phase of conviction where I am adamant to outside influence. For good or ill, I must stand by the conceptions that I have built out of my own life and its teachings.

  ‘There is another, and a more practical reason,’ he added, ‘why I should not do you or any other chaplain the disservice of taking up your time—I have no intention of dying.’

  With this, the young minister was forced to be content. He met Manfred frequently, talking of books and people and of strange religions.