Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 453
Indeed, the trials themselves proved quite as painful as anyone could have expected, though the coroner’s inquest was very decorously conducted. Mr. Fleight gently gave evidence that there was no particular reason why Miss Leroy should have called upon him, though there was certainly no reason whatever why she shouldn’t. It appeared, indeed, from the evidence of Mrs. Leroy that Gilda’s only motive was to gaze upon Mr. Fleight’s marble halls before she committed suicide. And she had determined to commit suicide as soon as, behind the sheet, she had heard that Mr. Fleight was unquestionably not for her. And Mrs. Leroy, who was really quite sorry for Mr. Fleight. did her very best to make him come off without the reputation of the betrayer of her daughter.
As has been said, the proceedings before the coroner were perfectly decorous, and, although they were very widely reported, the only thing that appeared at all discreditable to Mr. Fleight was the question of his name.
The coroner, a quite amiable but rather old gentleman, could not understand how or why at Palatial Hall, Mr. Fleight should be Mr. Fleight whilst at Byefleet he was Mr. Rothweil. The reason that Mr. Fleight gave was that his legal name was Rothweil, he being the legitimate son of the late soap-boiler, and, coming for the first time before the world, he had thought that it was proper and more formal to use his legal name. The coroner however, was unable to understand why he should ever have used any other. And it was a little unfortunate that, just as Mr. Fleight was explaining that the real name of his mother, Miss Maggie Tallantyre, was Fleight, the coroner should say:
“Well, well, I suppose it’s no affair of mine, and it certainly appears to have nothing to do with this case. I ought not, perhaps, to have asked the question.”
Reported in the newspapers this gave the general impression that there were discreditable episodes in the past career of Mr. Fleight, and that he had used that name for the purpose of masking his identity. That, however, had been only an impression.
The preliminary trial of Mr. Fleight’s assailants went off very quietly, too. Mr. Fleight had had practically no evidence to give at all. The assault had taken place in the dark and he had no means of identifying the men. The prisoners were indeed identified mainly by their own confessions, and they were sent to take their trial at the Quarter Sessions, the two soldiers being allowed out on bail. There were five prisoners altogether.
The trial at the Sessions took place in a fortnight. This was just five days before Mr. Fleight’s entertainment, and five days also before the nomination for the Byefleet election. Everyone had expected the election to come much sooner, but the Government had determined to put it off as long as possible in order to give their candidate time to mature his organisation. They had, therefore, refrained from conferring on Mr. Cronck, who was in Spain, the Stewardship of the Chiltern Hundreds, and they had not even applied for the writ until three days after the suicide of Miss Leroy.
The trial at the Quarter Sessions was a really horrible ordeal for poor Mr. Fleight. The counsel defending two of the prisoners was a smart man with an oily manner; the counsel defending the other three was a loud-mouthed brute, and Mr. Fleight had to undergo cross-examination at the hands of both of these gentlemen. He remained perfectly calm and quite adroit in his replies, but it was altogether an agony for him, and he was in the witness box over a couple of hours.
It probably would not have been so bad if everyone in court, and particularly the Common Sergeant, had not been in various stages of great ill-humour. This was principally on account of the hot weather, which had by that time begun to be very severe, and indeed that afternoon a great thunderstorm broke over the city. Throughout the whole of the case the Common Sergeant said, at almost every remark uttered by either counsel, “Get on, get on! What has that got to do with the matter?” So that Mr. Fleight’s counsel, who was a mild, incompetent man, the brother-in-law of the solicitors whom he employed, hardly managed to get a speech out at all, because the Common Sergeant so dazed and muddled him. Both the barristers for the defence harped eloquently on the fact that the prisoners they represented were heroes trying to rid their neighbourhood of a public pest, and the Common Sergeant refused to allow either of the Leroys to be called to give testimony as to the excellence of Mr. Fleight’s behaviour and the purity of his intentions. One of the defending barristers stated that Mr. Fleight was a monster in human form; the other hinted with great effect that the candidate for Byefleet had made the larger part of his fortune in what is known as the White Slave Traffic.
In his summing up the Common Sergeant remarked that that hadn’t anything to do with the case. Probably, Mr. Fleight had come into the Leroy’s neighbourhood with the most sinister intentions. What other reason had he, a very rich man, for going to such a place? But that was none of the Common Sergeant’s business. And having done his best to smash Mr. Fleight he went on to smash the prisoners. He said that the law had nothing to say to the motive for a crime. It was possible that the prisoners had acted with the intention of clearing their neighbourhood of a person dangerous to the females residing there. But that sort of thing must be stopped. And after the finding of the jury he sentenced each of the prisoners to two years’ hard labour in spite of the fact that all five of them had excellent records and that they were all below the age of nineteen. His final remark was that he hoped that the suicide of Miss Leroy would be a warning to Mr. Fleight, or one of these days that gentleman would find himself in serious trouble.
It was astonishing to Mr. Fleight himself how much these imbecile remarks hurt him. They were simply imbecile, but each of them rankled because, in an odd sort of way, he found it almost impossible to differentiate himself in his own mind from the criminal that they tried to make him out to be. He kept himself perfectly calm by an effort of will, but within himself he felt an individual boiling over with the desire to treat the Common Sergeant and all the counsel as the hooligans had treated him. And, if he hadn’t had Miss Macphail seated as his secretary in the body of the court, so that he could look down upon her when he was in the witness box, it is probable that he would have given violent expression to his feelings. His great wealth had bred in him a certain recklessness. Outside the realm of crime there was practically nothing that he could not have been able to afford himself, and contempt of court wasn’t a thing that would have bothered him very much.
With his eyes on Augusta, he had to feel that he couldn’t afford to jeopardise any further his endangered career. Besides, after he was out of the box Augusta, sitting beside him, didn’t refrain from uttering the words, “Rot” and “Perfectly rotten” when the defending counsel and the Common Sergeant in their speeches made references to Mr. Fleight. And, as they went out of the court together, she remarked:
“This is the most disgusting instance of British justice that even I have ever heard of.”
So that Mr. Fleight remarked to her:
“You don’t believe in the charges made against me?”
“Do I look such a fool?” Augusta answered almost contemptuously.
This speech emboldened Mr. Fleight to invite Augusta to lunch with him at the Carlton, and in the lounge he proposed to her.
She told him she wouldn’t even think of marrying him, and she gave him her reasons. She said she didn’t care for him, but that wouldn’t matter because she hadn’t ever cared for anybody and she didn’t suppose she was going to. What did really matter was that she couldn’t bring herself to believe in him. Augusta’s attitude, indeed, even towards Mr. Fleight’s fortune was very curious. She could not bring herself to believe in it, just as she could not understand why you couldn’t give a British voter two pounds by way of bribery when you might spend four thousand in erecting a bath for two hundred of them. What she probably really felt, though she never analysed herself far enough to discover it, was that although she knew Mr. Fleight had a great deal of money, she couldn’t believe that he was the sort of person to take care of it, and in that case he might just as well not have had it. She regarded him in fact as unlucky. So that when Mr. Fleight said:
“Oh, Augusta, I thought from the way you behaved in court that you were beginning to have some sympathy for me.’’
She retorted:
“Sympathy! Of course I had sympathy for you — the sort of sympathy that you have for a cat when three dachshunds have got hold of it. But you don’t want to marry the cat. Now do you?”
She regarded Mr. Fleight with her clear, hard, blue eyes. She was looking astonishingly beautiful. Driving about in the brougham had restored to her complexion some of its more shell-like tints, and, having found a job that so exactly amused and interested her — for she didn’t really want to do anything better in life than call on countesses, as she was doing all day long — a great deal of the hardness of her manner was disappearing and, during lunch, she had said several amusing, but quite withering things, about the personalities of some of Mr. Fleight’s political opponents.
She said that the Chancellor of the Exchequer, for instance, was like a gramophone which had learnt with difficulty to say one word—” enthusiasm.” This wasn’t a particularly good joke, but it had its point because, the night before, they had heard the Chancellor address a meeting of ten thousand dock operatives at Chatham, and the great man’s huge features, high voice and perpetual repetition of the same phrases were still very strongly in both their minds.
“No,” Augusta continued her frightful speech, “I don’t feel a repulsion from you as I used to do. It’s quite possible to have you about. But I simply don’t believe you’d be good business for a woman to marry. You don’t have any luck. I wouldn’t have minded half so much if you had done what they said about you in court. But as you haven’t, it makes you absolutely hopeless. You’re just the exact opposite of the fairy story that I used to hear as a child, called ‘Hans in Luck.’ I don’t see how you’ll ever get even into Parliament, and frankly, I believe I can do better for myself than you can for me.”
Mr. Fleight gave a deep groan and then he exclaimed: “At any rate you don’t feel a repulsion from me; that’s something to go on.”
“Oh, you’re all right,” Miss Macphail answered, “you’re not a bit worse than the editor of the Westminster Weekly I used to work for, and I put up with him.”
Mr. Fleight had real, large tears in his eyes, and he went straight off to Mr. Blood to give him an account of the interview. Mr. Blood, however, only wanted to hear about the trial. Mr. Blood said very sensibly that it wasn’t Mr. Fleight’s job to sit worrying about Augusta; it would be very much better for him if he tried to do something to get himself a less unlucky aspect in her eyes. And then he went straight off to see the Chancellor of the Exchequer.
He wanted to get the Chancellor to attend Mr. Fleight’s party. He had some luck. The Chancellor was to have gone that afternoon to a garden-party, where eleven thousand people from Scotland, Cornwall and Wales had been invited to meet him at tea. But towards half-past three, just as Mr. Blood set off from Burton Street, a really terrible hurricane descended upon London. Its precursor had been the heat which had rendered so irritable the Common Sergeant. And, indeed, the Common Sergeant’s temper turned out to be a piece of luck for Mr. Blood.
He found the Chancellor standing on the doorstep in Downing Street with his top hat on, surveying doubtfully the huge sheets of water that fell even between him and the door of Mr. Blood’s motor. Mr. Blood charged swiftly out and right into the hall. The Chancellor said: “Hullo! What’s this? Woman’s Suffrage?” and then he smiled. “What do you think of this weather? Not much weather for a garden-party; what?”
“You’d better give up the garden-party,” Mr. Blood said, “and give ten minutes to me. I want to ask you a favour.”
An enormous peal of thunder shook all the windows in the Treasury building, and the Chancellor again closed the umbrella that he had half opened. And, indeed, just at that moment, a dark young man, who was his secretary, came to say that the storm had blown down all the marquees in Lady Guestling’s garden and that the grounds, which lay rather low, resembled a lake. Her ladyship begged that the Chancellor wouldn’t even think of coming. She had just telephoned through.
“Well, we can get back to the estimates,” the Chancellor said contentedly, but Mr. Blood cut in:
“Look here, just give me ten minutes of your time. I want to ask a favour. I don’t mind saying that I’ll make it really worth your while.”
“Of course, if it’s a matter of a favour,” the Chancellor said. “Yes, yes, anything that I can do — I’m sure—” His manner was quite vacant, because he imagined that Mr. Blood was going to ask for a job for his brother Reginald, and the Chancellor, with his exceedingly tenacious mind, was perfectly determined that he would not give Reginald any job in the Civil Service. That would preclude his entering Parliament, and the Chancellor desired that Reginald should enter Parliament.
“I’m not really a man of straw,” Mr. Blood said again, “and, if you can oblige me, I’ll certainly make it worth your while.”
The Chancellor said:
“Oh, that’s all right. Certainly — Yes, yes. Come with me.”
He took Mr. Blood into the rather dark, rather small room on the left of the door, where there were two young men working at desks. He put his hat on the mantelshelf, dropped his umbrella on the floor, and looked at the papers that lay before first one young man and then the other.
“That word ought to be ‘Battlefleets’ — you understand. ‘Battlefleets of Austria’ — not simply ‘fleets’” he said, “‘Battlefleets’ sounds so much better.” He then remarked: “Hum, hum,” and stood in front of Mr. Blood, who had sat himself down. “Oh, yes, a favour,” he said. “What is it we want now?”
“I want you,” Mr. Blood said, “to come to Fleight’s party.”
“Fleight?” the Chancellor said, “I don’t know. Who’s he? I don’t suppose I shall have any time — I never have any time. You’re very lucky to get this ten minutes. I don’t suppose I could have given you ten minutes any other day for the next six months.”
“Mr. Fleight,” Mr. Blood remarked, “has just been outrageously handled in a trial.”
The Chancellor’s face fell in a sort of panic. He had got it firmly fixed in his head that Mr. Blood wanted a job for his brother, and he had not yet grasped the fact that he was speaking of somebody else.
“A trial!” he exclaimed. “We can’t have anything to do with trials. Don’t you understand? Interfering with the judiciary! That’s impossible.”
“But it was before the Common Sergeant,” Mr. Blood said cunningly. The Common Sergeant was one of those old and old-fashioned criminal magistrates who greatly inconvenience and irritate all progressive Governments in this country. He was continually inflicting barbarously harsh sentences, which the humanitarian Home Secretary as regularly reduced. Then the Common Sergeant would make from the bench biting remarks as to the Home Secretary and the Government in general. He was thus a perpetual scandal, so that he was detested by all the members of the Ministry.
“Oh, the Common Sergeant!” the Chancellor exclaimed. “He’s the devil of a fellow. I believe he gives the Home Office more trouble — at least, so I’ve heard.... We certainly ought to get rid of him. But the difficulty is one doesn’t know how it’s to be done.”
“You’d certainly give him a very nice slap in the face,” Mr. Blood continued, “if you’d come to Mr. Fleight’s party.”
“But who is Mr. Fleight?” the Chancellor asked — and then, attempting to show a jocular benevolence, he added: “What is he that you should thus commend him?” for he had a liking for the music of Schubert.
“He’s the Opposition candidate for Byefleet,” Mr. Blood brought out.
“I suppose,” the Chancellor said, “you mean the Government candidate. I can’t keep these fellows’ names in my head, but I had a vague idea it was Gregory.”
“Gregory’s got a writ for lunacy out against him,” Mr. Blood said.
“Oh, I see,” the Chancellor said, “then Gregory’s retiring and Mr. Fleight’s taking his place.”
“I don’t know so much about that,” Mr. Blood answered, “but Mr. Fleight’s moving heaven and earth to get Gregory out of the clutches of the lunacy people. He wants to attack the whole system. He’s, just this morning, started to instruct his solicitors to put about twenty men on the job to find out all the possible cases that could be published.”
“Well, it’s a very difficult job,” the Chancellor said, “I tried to reform them myself about four years ago. You remember my bill? But it hasn’t done much good. Still it’s a striking attempt — very creditable. I hope your friend will get in.”
“He’s the Opposition candidate, you know,” Mr. Blood said.
“But you said he’s trying to help our man!” the Chancellor exclaimed. “The story doesn’t hang together.”
“It wouldn’t hang together,” Mr. Blood said, “if my chap wasn’t so incredibly chivalrous. The moment he heard that your man was in danger of being shut up he almost went off his head about it.”
The Chancellor suddenly sat down upon a chair in front of Mr. Blood.
“This is a most extraordinary story,” he said. “Suppose you go through it in detail.”
Mr. Blood did go into it in detail. He told the circumstances of the trial in such a way as quite sensibly to enrage the Chancellor against the Common Sergeant. He told the story of Mr. Gregory in such a way as to make the great man hot in favour of that unfortunate individual. He pointed out that such chivalry as Mr. Fleight was showing ought to be rewarded by a similar chivalry from the Government. Most particularly he stated that Mr. Fleight wasn’t to be regarded necessarily as an opponent of the Government, and that if the Chancellor treated him prettily now, it might very well affect his attitude in the future. Besides, it was a public duty to give the Common Sergeant a slap in the face.
The Chancellor shook his head perplexedly.
“I wish I knew what to do!” he exclaimed. “I don’t know. You see I haven’t my usual advisers with me — the people who make up my mind about social affairs. It seems to me an unconventional affair — of course, that doesn’t matter to me. I’m not afraid of unconventional affairs — but still—”
