The whole rhythm of life throughout the prison seemed to alter since her conviction. Hours and rules were the same, but the human mind is only too terribly free of time. The consciousness of a fellow-human condemned to death oppressed all the bright, brisk officers, the nurses, the prisoners whose minds were sufficiently developed to allow of imagination. Every prisoner, except the borderline cases and those actually mentally deficient, was oppressed with a sense of cruelty and sadness. Somebody was going to be killed. It might have been any one of them. There was a great machine, bigger and stronger than any of them that could catch any one of them and do this thing. Every prisoner bore a tiny portion of Julia’s burden in her consciousness, and still there was the dreadful excitement, almost an exhilaration in the place at the same time as the depression.
It was odd, that mixture, thought the Lady Superintendent as she sat in her own bright sitting-room, surrounded by the snapshots of her nephews, complete with buckets and spades, taken at Littlehampton last summer. Was time going faster than usual, or more slowly? Was there an intenser sense of life, or a deepened sense of death? She couldn’t worry it out, even to herself. She only knew that something was terribly wrong somewhere, so that she rather hated the world, the law that she had served all her life, the great and good work to which she had devoted herself.
Of course, it was a dreadful thing to kill your husband—if this creature had killed her husband—but on the other hand, husbands themselves could be pretty dreadful propositions, if everything the prisoners had told her was true. She only wondered that they hadn’t all killed their husbands, for very few of them seemed to have good ones. If everyone were to be hanged who wished her husband dead, they’d have to pull down the prison and turn the whole eleven acres into a graveyard, reflected the Lady Superintendent, with a wry smile.
Some of the men were good, of course. Sad, ashamed young men, who came at visiting-hours and sat the other side of glass and wire-netting and said that little Bert was going on fine, and that the teacher was pleased with Alf, and that May, or Alice, or whatever her name might be, wasn’t to worry, because all was going on fine at home, except that they missed her.
There was old Mrs. Humble. She’s got a good husband, though he must have known what she’d been up to. What was wrong, and what was right? In what did sin consist? Mrs. Humble, cosy, pleasant-faced old lady, certainly didn’t look on herself as a criminal. Last time the Lady Superintendent had seen her, she had shown her with pride long letters she had written to “me husban’,” to Mrs. Clarkson, “That’s me married daughter”; to Joe Humble: “That’s me son,” and the Lady Superintendent had enquired solicitously as to whether the spectacles that her husband had sent her suited her, and on hearing that they didn’t—which was not remarkable, considering that Mrs. Humble’s eyes were entirely different from her husband’s—had promised her a visit from the oculist, and a new pair of spectacles. Mrs. Humble had been ever so pleased. Her motherly face had beamed all over, and she had produced a photograph of her latest grandchild for the Lady Superintendent’s admiration. Yet Mrs. Humble was doing ten years’ for an abortion … Mrs. Humble, whose husband only kept a tiny newspaper-shop, and whose son was out of work, had nearly two thousand pounds laid by in the Savings Bank, and it had all been obtained by the pursuit of a profession which Mrs. Humble genuinely believed to be a philanthropic one. What, after all, had she done but help poor girls out of a trouble which civilisation would not permit to be anything else? Wasn’t it, except in very rare cases, always economic pressure that had brought everyone into the prison? Not merely women who were in for debt because they couldn’t pay their rates—some of whom came in regularly year after year, worked off their debt, so to speak, and went off to their homes again having cost those citizens who did pay their rates quite a lot of money—but all the other women also, the street-walkers; the shoplifters; the members of thieves’ gangs; the abortionists. They had all done what they had done because they hadn’t any money; and the Mrs. Humbles could even think that they had been doing a good work as well. It was all very difficult, and the only thing to hang on to was that society must be protected. That was the only thing, considered the Lady Superintendent, for she was only too miserably conscious that she herself might have been anything, and done anything, had her circumstances only been different. “There, but for the grace of God …” the chaplain had quoted to her once, and it had stuck in her mind ever since.
She hated to visit Starling—she hated her own bright, kind manner as she went into the cell. She hated the futility of her own utterances, but she couldn’t think of anything better to say. What could she say? What, indeed, could anybody say? But Starling herself didn’t seem to want to say anything beyond the ordinary banalities. She seemed oddly like a woman in a dream. Then the Governor came to tell her there was no reprieve—he had received a letter from the Secretary of State. He read it to her. She didn’t seem to mind as she had at the failure of the appeal. She sat quietly.
The door was kept open, as always. A mockery of freedom. It seemed to Julia worse than if it had been locked.
The day dragged endlessly—not that she wanted it to go fast, and yet why didn’t she want it to go fast? It wasn’t really her last day. She didn’t, she couldn’t believe that. Yet the day did seem somehow different and odd. Perhaps because they kept on giving her bromide, just as they had done yesterday, and she felt stupid with it.
The doctor came in two or three times, the chaplain came and talked with her. She couldn’t speak at all herself. She sat and looked at them with her short-sighted eyes wide open, not screwing them up as usual to try and see better. Miss Quint and Miss Paramore came on as usual in the evening. Miss Quint took her hand and pressed it. Julia let her hand lie limp. The whole thing was, somehow, embarrassing. How could anybody expect her to speak or listen when they must know that all the time she was waiting for the news to come—the news of the last-minute reprieve. She was pinning all her hopes on that—that thing you read about in books, that arrived at the last moment that always saved you.
She thought it had come, about nine. She had been told not to go to bed. She wondered why, rather dully. She didn’t want to go to bed, but when the Lady Superintendent came in she jumped up, sure that the news had come at last. But it was something quite different. They were going to move her room, explained the Lady Superintendent, there was nothing to be frightened about. She would have a nice bed. They would give her something to make her sleep—they would give it her now. It was just that they were going to move her room.
The little procession started out—the Lady Superintendent, Miss Quint, Miss Paramore and a nurse. They went along a corridor and up a flight of stairs. Julia walked slowly and draggingly; her mind, mercifully numb, hadn’t told her the reason for this change. Suddenly she realised that she was in the prison itself; the real prison as distinct from the hospital. The corridors seemed to branch out like the spokes of a fan in every direction, the walls were painted a pretty green, all the ironwork of balustrades, the wire netting stretched from floor to floor, the spiral staircases, woodwork, and cell doors, everything was painted this pretty, soft green. It really looked quite pretty in the soft gas-light, and yet the whole place felt, in its silence, like a tomb. There wasn’t a sound, save the footfalls of the little procession. They went past cell doors, all locked, to the far end of a long corridor, and in at a green-painted door.
Julia looked about her. There were the usual chairs, the little table. To the right as she came in was the incandescent gas-bracket; opposite, against the wall, was a little bed, neatly made up. It had two windows, filled with small panes of opaque, ribbed glass, of which two or three were missing to allow of air. The night was very blue and still outside. Julia looked about her cell with a dull sort of surprise. Then she saw at the far end of the cell another door, a small, arched door, painted green, and in a flash it came upon her where she was. It was through that door that she would have t
o pass to-morrow morning, twelve hours from now … only twelve hours from now.
Then she screamed and fought, and went mad, and tried to climb up the green wall, scrabbling at it with her nails, but she felt arms all about her, holding her down. She went on screaming; somebody had shut the cell door, and it seemed full of people. Then there came the prick in her arm, and fight and scream as she would, she felt a dullness coming over her legs and arms, and her head fell forward.
They laid her on the bed, and arranged the blankets over her. She mustn’t go to sleep—she mustn’t. She was losing precious time. She must talk to them, explain how it had all happened. Surely she could show them that they mustn’t do this dreadful thing?
Night Piece to Julia
All over the prison, and in the homes of those to do with the prison, the uneasy consciousness of Julia Starling, and of the approach of nine o’clock next morning, seemed to hold the very air, gripping it as a frost grips it. The prisoners turned uneasily in their beds, some shouted and cried out, one woman tore her blanket to shreds. The officers wished to God that the next twenty-four hours, the next week, or even month, lay already in the past. It wasn’t only that such an event made all the prisoners refractory and difficult, it was also that you felt awful, in some odd way guilty, when you’d known the prisoner herself, tended her in the infirmary, or sat with her in that last awful room where the light burned all night. You couldn’t face with equanimity what was to take place at nine. Nine, when so many thousands and thousands of people would be sitting down to their eggs and bacon, when many more thousands would already be on their way to work. And nearly every one of them thinking. … Is it over yet? Not liking to look at watch or clock lest it should be the actual minute. Not wanting to look until the hands stood at five minutes past, when they could draw a deep breath and say more comfortably: “Well, it’s all over now, anyway.”
The Beale family had gone out to the pictures. “No good doing nothing but think,” George had said, and Mrs. Almond sat idly listening to the kindly efforts of the woman next door to distract her thoughts. Did some little voice whisper to that kind neighbour that for the rest of her life it would be something to remember, something to say: “I sat up all night with poor Julia Starling’s mother. The awful time I had … too dreadful it was!” Yet at the same time it didn’t seem so very dreadful, only oddly boring, and somehow strange. The neighbour didn’t realise it herself all the time; her thoughts would drift off to her own married daughter, who was “expecting” next month; to that new hat of hers with the scarlet flowers in it. She’d have to take them out now; it wouldn’t seem quite nice to come and go at One Beresford flaunting scarlet. …
“Drink this hot cup of tea, love. … It’ll do you good,” and Mrs. Almond would drink it. And Mrs. Almond’s thoughts also wandered. They weren’t on Julia the whole of that night. They were often on herself, on the disgrace Julia had brought on her, though she supposed she oughtn’t to think of that now; but how could she help it? They’d have to move now, just as she thought she was settled. People blamed her for agreeing to sell that blue Italian officer’s cape to the waxwork people, but fifty pounds was fifty pounds when you’d had so much expense and didn’t know where to turn for money.
Mr. Carr sat steadily dosing himself with whisky after whisky. Mrs. Carr lay wrapped in a flame of agony. For her no nice hot cups of tea, no thoughts of how she was to live, nothing but the pain that seemed to tear at her womb. Over and over again she remembered Leonard’s birth, the agony, her own screams echoing in her ears, the smug face of the doctor who didn’t believe in chloroform for women in childbirth; it was more natural for them to help themselves. … Would he have believed in chloroform for this agony? She pressed her old knotted hands against her belly; she wished that she were dead, that she could die instead of him, or at least, that she could die. Such a boy as he’d always been till he met that woman … the way he looked at you and laughed and said: “Hullo, old lady” … and kissed you, and brought out some present or other. That last box of dates hadn’t been opened yet.
Gipsy, who had not the habit of prayer, spent most of the hours upon her knees. She couldn’t say anything more definite than: “Oh, God, if You exist … if You are anywhere … please stop it,” but she said it over and over again.
Marian was not with her. Marian was dining out with her latest husband-to-be.
Ruby, with her newest lover, a very rich man indeed called Maurice, in the intervals of sipping champagne, sobbed upon his shoulder. Eventually he had to promise her a new necklace and take her to a night club to dance the hours away. When the time for bacon and eggs arrived she was sufficiently recovered to tell him of her childhood struggles in the cause of her art.
Dr. Ackroyd and Anne faced each other miserably in their drawing-room in Saint Clement’s Square. If only, thought Anne, they had had a couple of baby cases that night, that would have taken their thoughts off. … There wasn’t even any influenza.
Anne sat trying to read, but really listening to her father walking up and down the room.
“She’d have been all right,” he said suddenly, “if nothing overwhelming had come into her life.”
“I shouldn’t have thought,” said Anne, putting down her book, “that Leonard Carr would have been overwhelming.”
“No, you wouldn’t: but after all, he was only the peg to hang her emotions on. She wanted something that she could dress up, and pretend to herself was overwhelming. Why, for God’s sake, don’t women clear their minds of this ‘in love’ cant, and simply use a man as most men use women?”
“They want something else,” said Anne, “even I should. It was just that something else that Julia always wanted—even when we were at school. She lived on—I don’t quite know how to put it—that romantic assumption that there was something wonderful and golden, something complete and round; that was what she wanted.”
“Exactly. That’s what all women want, and when they find it doesn’t exist they invent it, and dress it up. Oh, Lord, the longer I live the more I agree with Walt Whitman: ‘Sometimes I turn and look at the animals. …’”
“She wanted what she called love,” said Anne.
“Oh, well, it’s no good arguing about that, because we should first have to decide what love is. The simple classification of ‘Sacred and Profane love’ is not for this generation. I believe that if people were only content with what they describe as ‘purely physical,’ it would be a much better thing. Instead of simply going to bed with each other, and getting that particular desire out of the system, our modern civilisation makes them dress it up, makes them pretend they’re the sort of people they’re not, so as to be able to call the thing ‘love.’ That’s what’s happened to Julia. Carr would have been content with the decent, honest side of the business—ephemeral, I admit, but none the less exciting and interesting while it lasts. But that wasn’t good enough for her. It had to be translated into terms of eternity, or at the least of permanence. And he kept her letters! If only people would keep their mouths shut and their bowels open, what a different world it would be. But this affair of Julia’s … what waste … what sickening waste.”
“Yes,” said Anne miserably, “what sickening waste. If only she hadn’t procured that abortion I believe she would have been a happy woman, although it was Herbert’s. She was just the sort of woman to pour herself into motherhood. All she wanted was a vessel to pour herself into.” And then she stopped, realising with horror that she was speaking of Julia in the past tense: and she began to cry.
“After all, Anne,” said Dr. Ackroyd, putting his hand on her shoulder, “we’ve all got to die. We’re all dying from our early twenties. We all start to go down-hill from then, although we feel so lusty and confident. Old age isn’t beautiful, my dear. In another ten years—if I live as long—you’ll wish to goodness I were out of it, for your own sake as well as for mine. Old age isn’t lovely … we grow old and we b
ecome a burden, and we think how foolish the young are … and we die. … And that’s all there is to be said of each generation. There are very few dying words worth saying, as you know—being a doctor. Most of us are dead for a considerable time before the undertaker can be called in. The Ancients knew a thing or two, and they thought that those whom the gods love …”
“I know, I know,” said Anne. “But not this way, not this way …” and to that her father had no answer.
Sir Oswald tried to read, but he kept on finding he had to go back and read the page over again because he had not consciously noted a line of it. At last he gave up the effort and returned to the thought that was always torturing him. Could he have done more? If he had threatened more forcibly to throw up his brief when she insisted on going into the box …? He felt he could have almost certainly saved her if only she had kept her mouth shut, but she would not. And she had lied, contradicted herself, and told the truth, so that a bewildered jury had come to the conclusion that all her evidence was a web of lies. If he had boldly admitted that particular letter which had referred to procuring an abortion …? But then an English jury was likely to hang you for adultery, and still more for abortion.
He listened every day to the casual comments of the streets, and to those of his own charwoman at his chambers. She and the other women of her sort thought that that poor young Carr was a fine fellow, and Julia a wicked woman to have “carried on” like that with a mere boy, because youth and swagger had imposed upon them; and never would they change their minds. And women who were more educated, like Mrs. Danvers, who had understood, had not been powerful enough to stop the process of the law’s revenge. How, the Home Office asked, could they reprieve a man who had killed another by attacking him from behind, and how—she being seven years older—could the boy hang, and she be saved? Yet there was something wrong with the machinery of justice that one crime should produce another such as this. … Lack of imagination? But then it would never do to introduce imagination into the law. And yet—that a woman should hang because she had slept with a man not her husband, and that man younger than herself; that thousands of other women should be against her, incapable of thinking clearly, and, urged on by some ignoble and unrealised jealousy, sit smugly and allow this thing to take place at nine o’clock. … Sir Oswald tried to read again.
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