The Dawn of Reckoning

by James Hilton

  Meanwhile, the wheel of fate still moved inexorably round. One result of the popular outcry against Stella (“the woman who had driven him to do it”) was that a great deal of public sympathy was aroused for Ward. Stella hoped that this would be shown by the size of a petition that was being signed for a reprieve. She was quite certain that the death sentence would never be carried out. “For one thing, it may get quashed on appeal. And, in any case, the Home Secretary can’t ignore a petition signed by half the country.”

  Mrs. Bowden was less confident. “Hope for victory, but don’t count on it,” she advised. “And don’t forget that your chief enemy is not the Home Secretary, but the creature who occupies every cabinet post in every government—Mrs. Grundy.”

  The petition was organized by Ward’s solicitors, but Stella received a cold rebuff when she visited them and offered her help. They gave her to understand plainly that the less she had to do with it the more successful it was likely to be, and that her most valuable service to the prisoner would be to keep out of things as much as possible. It was this that decided her to refuse the Sunday Wire’s offer of a thousand pounds for an article. Mrs. Bowden rather favoured an acceptance. “After all, a thousand isn’t to be sneezed at, and it may come in very handy for you some day. Besides, you won’t have to write anything—only your signature at the end.” But after the interview with Ward’s solicitors, Stella wrote refusing the offer. A wire in return increased the offer to fifteen hundred, and then she wrote explaining that in no circumstances would she have anything to do with the matter. The Wire published her letter in full under the heading: “Mrs. Monsell’s Refusal.”

  About a week after the trial she had to meet Mrs. Monsell at a solicitor’s office in connection with a business matter. Mrs. Monsell’s attitude was curious; she seemed just as full as ever of her usual acid volubility. Her manner seemed to say: “I am too broad-minded to be rude to you, and you are perhaps even more interesting (which is the main thing) after all that has happened. But, of course, you must recognize that what you have done puts you outside the pale of society. Therefore I can only regard you as a curiosity, like my Armenian violinists, postman-poets, and other freaks.”

  Soon afterwards Stella heard that Mrs. Monsell had gone to America. The picture-papers called her “Mother of Chassingford Victim.”

  II

  Time dragged fearfully at Brighton, even in Mrs. Bowden’s energetic company. During the long days of waiting for the hearing of the appeal, there was nothing at all to do except to make tiresome visits to the shops, or go motoring with Mrs. Bowden in her enormous Renault limousine. Mrs. Bowden, indeed, took complete command, insisting that Stella should accompany her to this place and that, even though she agreed listlessly and without interest. On almost every day the sun shone, making a perfect holiday for all the happy crowds whom Stella envied, and who in their ignorance envied her just as much.

  The newspapers, however, had familiarized the country with her appearance, and once or twice when she was recognized, her identity, combined with the extravagant opulence of the car, aroused hostility. This was one of the results of the Daily and Sunday Wire propaganda. Those enterprising journals, disappointed in their efforts to buy Stella’s signature to an article, had begun a fierce campaign against her, cleverly exploiting her nationality for the purpose. Every day there appeared articles on the alien peril almost every day the crime passionel was the subject of a special contribution by some medical, legal, psychological, or sociological expert. Their conclusions pointed to the undoubted superiority of the English over every other nationality, and the necessity for purging our national life from “alien pests” and “continental” ideas of morality. Some of these attacks went so far that the Hungarian Minister protested, declaring in a letter to the Press that “it must not be supposed that the events disclosed in a recent murder trial are at all typical of Hungarian life and manners…”

  Whenever the crowd recognized Stella, Mrs. Bowden was tactlessly and unnecessarily bellicose. Evidently she enjoyed the flouting of convention, and when at Worthing one afternoon the windows of the car were smashed and she and Stella had to take refuge in the police station, her zestful indignation knew no bounds. “I won’t be intimidated by a mob,” she cried to the police superintendent. “I’m sixty-nine, and a fighter yet.”

  The people of Brighton, less demonstrative, were none the less hostile. Mrs. Bowden despised them.

  “The folks who live here,” she said, “are real freezers. But the visitors aren’t so bad, especially the week-ending couples. Saturday-to-Monday out-for-a-good-timers, bless them…”

  She added quite calmly: “I was one myself once, so maybe that’s why I’m not bigoted about it.”

  III

  Once she said to Stella: “What will you do it the sentence gets quashed on appeal?”

  Stella answered morosely: “I don’t know.”

  “You haven’t any money?”

  “Not a penny. But I could earn some.”

  “It isn’t as easy as you think. But perhaps the doctor has money?”

  Stella flushed. “And do you think I could take money from him?”

  Mrs. Bowden shrugged her shoulders. “Why not? Forgive me, my dear, if I’m rather too much a realist for you. You see I’ve had such real experiences…and it seems to me that since you love him—”

  “I love him? How do you know that?”

  “At the trial—”

  “Oh, yes, I remember…Good God, I remember…Go on.”

  “Well, my dear, since you love him—”

  She could get no further than that. Stella covered her face with her hands and burst into sobbing. “I can’t bear it—I can’t bear it…Even you don’t understand.”

  “Don’t I? Very likely not. Who does, anyway, except you yourself?”

  Stella looked up with sudden calm. “What would you advise me to do?” she asked.

  Mrs. Bowden said quietly: “Put the past on one side. Begin life afresh. Don’t ruin your future with false conventions. Don’t shackle yourself with a morality you don’t believe in. If Ward wins, as I hope he will, go with him abroad and stay there till the world has forgotten. Thank God it has a short memory. And if money is the only difficulty, then I can—”

  Stella interrupted her with a half-sad smile. “I’m afraid you don’t understand at all, Mrs. Bowden. I can never marry him, even if he were willing.”

  “And why not, indeed?”

  She answered: “Because—because—Oh, God—because I’m not certain—not certain that he’s innocent…”

  Mrs. Bowden raised her eyebrows. “My dear,” she said gently, “I never supposed he was.”

  IV

  Stella was on fire in an instant.

  “What! What! Do you think he’s guilty? Have you thought so all along? Oh, God! What do you think?”

  “Does it matter what I think?”

  “Oh, don’t argue—tell me…”

  “Stella, I must argue. I say, does it matter what I think? I say more; I say, does it matter whether he’s guilty or not? He loves you and you love him—”

  “Oh, it does matter—it does matter. It’s everything—”

  “To you. You, the Hungarian, are chaste, moral, almost proper. I, the Englishwoman—oh, well, no need to make a boast of it. But if a man loved me, and I loved him, I would not care what crime he committed—even murder.”

  “Wouldn’t you?” Stella seemed almost incredulous. Then she began to speak slowly and carefully. “You don’t understand me. In fact, to be frank, I’m here on false pretences. You thought I was a woman who plotted with her lover to murder her husband. Didn’t you?”

  “I did.”

  “I’m afraid I must be terribly disappointing.”

  “Don’t be foolish. I’m here to help you, whatever you are and whatever you’ve done. I have never been impertinent enough to question you about the matter. For us to discuss Ward, however, is different—”

  “Oh, Ward�
��Ward…Isn’t it curious that I’ve never called him by his Christian name?…And you think he is guilty then?”

  Her voice was quite calm.

  “As an outsider judging by evidence alone, I feel quite certain of it.”

  “Yes…yes…I remember he once told me he was afraid of what he’d do if he lost control—we were talking about drinking, and he said he was teetotal because he was afraid of killing somebody if he got drunk .. Oh, yes, he did kill Philip—he must have done, and it’s stupid of me to keep trying to think otherwise…But Philip—Philip…Oh, you don’t understand me—nobody understands me. They don’t understand how I loved Philip. Yes, Philip as well as Ward. Until he grew cold and strange, I was quite happy with him—I loved him like a little baby that I had to look after. When he was a boy—a big boy—and I was a girl, we were so happy together—he used to teach me things—and I—in a way—I used to worship him. He was very good to me then. It was only towards the end, when he wasn’t well—O God, I wish I had been kinder to him…Poor Philip, so ill and weak, and Ward, big and strong—oh, it was a brutal, dreadful thing to do…and the man who did it—I hate him—I—”

  “Yet you hope he wins his appeal?”

  Mrs. Bowden’s voice was full of sweetness.

  “Yes. Yes. I hope that. I can’t help hoping that.” She suddenly flung herself face downwards on the settee and buried her head in the cushions. “O God, they mustn’t hang him!” she screamed, sobbing convulsively. “Not hang him!—I want him!—I want him to live and do great things and wipe out this fearful business…And yet they’ll hang him and take away his only chance…Oh, what can I do?—What can anybody do? They’ll hang him—What can I do to stop them? Tell me—tell me—for God’s sake—”

  “So you still love him?”

  The reply was almost inaudible. “Yes…But I will never, never see him again…”

  V

  The appeal was heard in the middle of July. It lasted two days, and on the afternoon of the second, Stella was in the streets when she heard the newsboys shouting: “Result of Ward’s Appeal.” She bought a paper and learned that the appeal had been dismissed.

  For several moments she stood on the kerb as in a trance. She could not see the traffic; there was something heavy and monstrous in front of her eyes. People were staring, and those who recognized her were doubtless explaining the full piquancy of the situation to those who didn’t. It was only the slow and gradual realization of the amount of attention she was attracting that made her grope her way along the blazing, heartless streets.

  She went back to the house and cried. Without realizing it, she had pinned all her faith to this appear; she had felt an inward certainty that the sentence would be quashed or at least reduced. So many barriers had seemed to loom between the prisoner and the hangman, and to each one in its turn she had given all her hope. But now the biggest and most redoubtable of the barriers had come crashing to earth.

  Suddenly the full visualization of all that was to happen came to her. She saw before her eyes the prison, and the drop, and the hangman’s rope…Her blood tingled into frigidity; it almost seemed that her heart stopped its beating. She could not cry out or scream; the vision was too paralyzingly horrible. She sat facing it with dry lips and glassy eyes, hypnotized, nerveless. The terror was most fearful when the spell was broken; when the blood raced and the heart beat wildly. The newspaper headlines echoed like doom…“Appeal dismissed…dismissed.” All the misery of the past seemed suddenly heaped upon her, and with the misery a frantically growing panic. Mrs. Bowden had gone out, and when she returned, she found Stella gazing into an empty firegrate with wild uncanny eyes.

  The paper with its dreadful headlines lay on the floor. Stella picked it up and pointed to a small paragraph at the foot of the report of the appeal. It stated that “the execution is fixed to take place at Holloway Gaol at nine o’clock on the morning of August 5th.”

  “There are three weeks yet,” said Mrs. Bowden. Stella nodded. “And I shall be mad before then,” she said.

  VI

  The only hope lay now in a petition for reprieve. It was reported that many people all over the country were eager to sign one. But a most unfortunate event took place in the meantime. A youth named Watson had been jilted by a girl, whereupon he had taken the fearful revenge of throwing vitriol over her and her new lover. The man was so terribly injured that he died in hospital, and the girl herself was disfigured and eventually lost the sight of both eyes. Watson was tried for murder and sentenced to death. A petition for reprieve was launched on the ground that he had received great provocation, but the Home Secretary refused to consider it, observing in his reply that no provocation that he could think of could in any way diminish the guilt of such a dreadful crime. Watson was accordingly executed on July 20th.

  Everybody realized that the execution lessened considerably the likelihood of a reprieve being granted to Ward. Ward’s position and past career even told against him, for Watson had been an ill-educated farm-labourer, and the Home Secretary, in the present precarious situation of the Government, was not likely to give scope for an outcry about one law for the rich and another for the poor. There were people, of course, who said that Ward’s was a gentlemanly crime—almost a decent one—compared with Watson’s; but on the other hand there were fierce logicians who replied that Watson had had his woman stolen from him, whereas Ward was both the murderer and the thief. Indeed, it was very likely true, as a certain Home Office official said in the privacy of his London club, that “but for this damnable Watson case, Ward would certainly be reprieved.”

  July gave place to August, and the petition, supposed to have been signed by over a hundred thousand names, was delivered to the Home Secretary in a small fleet of taxi-cabs. The affair was much photographed; indeed every feature of the case was exploited by Fleet Street for a good deal more than it was worth. This sensational publicity harmed, rather than helped, for it spread the quite erroneous idea that Ward possessed great influence. The attitude of the man in the street, frequently expressed, was: “He’ll get off all right. They don’t hang his sort.”

  Stella’s hopes, always eager to be rekindled, rose again over the delivery of the petition. Somebody in the Press had mooted the idea of a special petition signed by eminent men—explorers, geographers, historians, authors, and public men of all kinds. To Stella it seemed an idea that could not fail. Mrs. Bowden was less optimistic. “Don’t expect the big people to take his part,” she said. “Half of them are jealous of him and glad that he’s down. And the other half are too frightened to face the music. Ward’s come a cropper, and the big people only back winners.”

  The “special” petition was duly launched, however, and duly met the fate that Mrs. Bowden had prophesied for it. A few semi-significant nobodies gave their names, more for the advertisement to themselves than for the cause; and the whole project died a very natural death. Sir Julius Hopton, F.R.G.S., approached for his signature, replied: “It is true that I have been an explorer, but it is also true that I have been an M.P. On the whole, I think I should be more likely to put my name to a petition praying that under no circumstances should Philip Monsell’s murderer escape the full legal penalty.” It was difficult to convince people that Sir Julius had rather missed the point.

  A few days later, on August 3rd, the Home Secretary replied. “After full consideration,” he wrote, “I cannot see that any fresh facts have been brought forward to justify me in recommending His Majesty to grant a reprieve.”

  That was all, and it was well understood to be final. To Stella it was the almost incredible shattering of her dream, but most other people were neither surprised not indignant.

  VII

  On the night of August 3rd there was a terrific thunderstorm. It wakened Stella into stark panic; she screamed and sobbed frantically until, from very weariness a calmness came. Even then her self-discipline was fitful, feverish, almost demoniacal. “I’m going mad, Mrs. Bowden,” she said quietly. “I
mean it. Oh, I can’t bear it all. Why should they hang him—oh, God—they mustn’t—they mustn’t…”

  Mrs. Bowden had her own ideas. She wakened the chauffeur out of his bed at four in the morning and told him to prepare the car. The rain was still falling heavily, but she insisted on Stella driving with her through the hissing streets. It was hardly dawn, and the vast wet promenade was grey and empty. Every now and then the lightning blazed over the sea and glinted on the curling wave-crests. Stella pulled down the side-window and breathed deeply the cool sea-salt wind. “That makes me calmer,” she said.

  “I know,” answered Mrs. Bowden. And she added softly: “From experience.”

  They drove through Portslade and Shoreham to Littlehampton, and then turned inland to Horsham and back home over the grey mist-swathed Downs. The sun was blazing upon them as they swished down the Ditchling Road at half-past seven.

  “It is so kind of you to have done such an odd thing,” said Stella over breakfast.

  Mrs. Bowden answered: “If only you knew what odd things I have done!”

  They did not mention Ward at all during the day. At night Mrs. Bowden said: “Do you think you will be able to sleep to-night?”

  “Perhaps I may. I feel very sleepy.”

  “That’s right. Try to sleep late in the morning. I’ll tell the maid not to call you.”

  “Sleep late in the morning,” Stella echoed. She seemed to ponder over the phrase, and then replied: “Yes, I think I will.” She added, slowly: “I suppose there isn’t—anything—anything more—that can be done?”

  Mrs. Bowden took her hand quietly in hers. “Nothing at all, my dear,” she answered softly. “Don’t think about it. Try to sleep.”